“To make him strong and mighty, Drank by the tale, six pots of ale And a quart of Aqua Vitæ!” and marched forth fiercely to a ferocious fight with a green leather dragon stuffed with fiery serpents, that hissed and exploded to the tune of two-pence a time! The Bartlemy fairities were in raptures. Master Magnumdagnumhuggleduggle, Mr. Big stick, the Tumblctuzzy and the Dragon were successively garlanded with broccoli-sprouts and turnip-tops! It was all round my hat” with Bonassus, who divided the Lion's share with the Dragon, and looked like a May-day Jack-in-the-green! The enthusiasm of the audience did not end here. They called for the Call-boy, and the Candle-snuffer, whose bliss would have felt no cc aching void” had a “bit of bacon” accompanied, by way of a relish, this kitchen garden of cabbage. The bells of St. Bartholomew chimed the hour when churchyards and “Charlies” yawn; upon which the illuminations and mob went out, and away, and Momus looked as down in the mouth as a convolvulus. * * Next morning's sun saw Smithfield restored to those polite intelligences whose “talk is of bullocks”--with no greater nuisance remaining, than its chartered brutes upon Jour legs, beaten, goaded, tortured, and blasphemed at by its greater brutes upon two! The elephant booked his trunk and departed; the menagerie man returned to his dish of bird's claws and beaks, with a second course of shark's teeth and fish-bones; Punch and Judy were amicably domiciled with the dog, the devil, and the doctor; the Jacks-in-the-box, Noah's arks, Dutch dolls, and wooden Scaramouches, were stowed away pell-mell; the gingerbread kings, queens, and nuts, were huddled higgledy-piggledy into their tin canisters; a muddled chorister warbled “Fly not yet” to an intrusive “Blue-Bottle” that popped in the Queen's Crown and his own among a midnight dancing party of shopmen and Abigails, and a solitary fiddle, scraped by a cruel cobbler, squeaked the _Lay of the Last Minstrel!_ Morn appearing, Nature cheering, Milkmaids crying “Milk!” for tea, Singing, joking; chimneys smoking, Bring, alas! no joys to me. Phoebus beaming, kettles steaming-- Basso--hark I the dustman's bell, Obligato!--ff Sweep!” stoccato! _Old St. Bartle!_ sound thy knell. CHAPTER XIII. |Put out the light!” exclaimed Mr. Bonassus Bigstick, with a lugubrio-comic expression of countenance that might convulse a Trappist, to a pigeon-toed property-man and a duck-legged drummer, who were snuffing two farthing rushlights in the Proscenium.