Arter he had been mad for a week—in a state of mind, in short, in
which, if I had let him sit on the organ for only two minutes, I
believe he would have bust—but we kep the organ from him—Mr. Chops
come round, and behaved liberal and beautiful to all. He then sent
for a young man he knowed, as had a wery genteel appearance and was a
Bonnet at a gaming-booth (most respectable brought up, father havin
been imminent in the livery stable line but unfort’nate in a commercial
crisis, through paintin a old gray, ginger-bay, and sellin him with a
Pedigree), and Mr. Chops said to this Bonnet, who said his name was
Normandy, which it wasn’t:
“Normandy, I’m a goin into Society. Will you go with me?”
Says Normandy: “Do I understand you, Mr. Chops, to hintimate that the
’ole of the expenses of that move will be borne by yourself?”
“Correct,” says Mr. Chops. “And you shall have a Princely allowance
too.”
The Bonnet lifted Mr. Chops upon a chair, to shake hands with him, and
replied in poetry, with his eyes seemingly full of tears:
“My boat is on the shore,
And my bark is on the sea,
And I do not ask for more,
But I’ll Go:—along with thee.”
They went into Society, in a chay and four grays with silk jackets. They
took lodgings in Pall Mall, London, and they blazed away.
In consequence of a note that was brought to Bartlemy Fair in the
autumn of next year by a servant, most wonderful got up in milk-white
cords and tops, I cleaned myself and went to Pall Mall, one evening
appinted. The gentlemen was at their wine arter dinner, and Mr. Chops’s
eyes was more fixed in that Ed of his than I thought good for him.
There was three of ’em (in company, I mean), and I knowed the third
well. When last met, he had on a white Roman shirt, and a bishop’s
mitre covered with leopard-skin, and played the clarionet all wrong, in
a band at a Wild Beast Show.
This gent took on not to know me, and Mr. Chops said: “Gentlemen, this
is a old friend of former days:” and Normandy looked at me through a
eye-glass, and said, “Magsman, glad to see you!”—which I’ll take my oath
he wasn’t. Mr. Chops, to git him convenient to the table, had his chair
on a throne (much of the form of George the Fourth’s in the canvass),
but he hardly appeared to me to be King there in any other pint of
view, for his two gentlemen ordered about like Emperors. They was all
dressed like May-Day—gorgeous!—And as to Wine, they swam in all sorts.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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