Mornings at Bow Street: A Selection of the Most Humorous and Entertaining Reports which Have Appeared in the 'Morning Herald'Wight, J. (John)
General
Mornings at Bow Street: A Selection of the Most Humorous and Entertaining Reports which Have Appeared in the 'Morning Herald'
Wight, J. (John)
Crime -- England -- London
and, having bought a new band-box for his mother's bonnet, he rode home to
Clapham, put the horse in a butcher's stable, gave it some corn, had his
own supper, and went to bed dreadfully tired. In the morning he got up
early, wrote an advertisement about the horse, and was coming to town to
put it in the papers, when he met the gentleman, who was very angry with
him, and gave him into custody.
Mr. Marchant, in reply, said he was inclined to believe his story, but he
thought it right he should be told authoritatively that he was not to play
such pranks with impunity.
The magistrate, therefore, gave John Saunders a suitable admonition, and
dismissed him.
'PON MY HONOUR IT'S TRUE.
A German mechanic having laid information at this office that a countryman
of his, named Schultz, residing in Green Street, Leicester Square, was
kept in a state of durance, in his own house, by an Englishwoman, who, he
verily believed, had a design both upon his life and property, the
magistrate sent some officers to bring the parties before him.
They accordingly proceeded to the house, but the English lady peremptorily
refused them admission, and it was several hours before they were able to
effect an entrance. At length, however, they brought the parties to the
office in a hackney coach--for the lady was too magnificent to walk, and
the poor old German was so afflicted with paralysis, that he was carried
before the magistrate on the back of one of his countrymen.
He was indeed a miserable object--his limbs utterly useless--his eyes dull
and unnaturally protruding--his beard unshaved--his hair matted with
feathers--and his whole person disgustingly filthy.
The lady, on the contrary, was a fine bouncing woman, of rather handsome
countenance, gaily dressed in a fashionable bonnet and plume, and her fat
white fingers covered with glittering rings. Nevertheless she bodily
professed that she _loved_ the poor emaciated, dirty, paralytic old man;
and she affirmed that all her attentions to him were purely disinterested.
He was exactly in the same state, she said, when she first became
acquainted with him, five years ago--not worth a single sixpence, over
head and ears in debt, half crazy, of filthy habits, lame, old, and
impotent--and yet she _loved_ him--loved him for himself alone. ("Oh! who
doth know the bent of woman's phantasy?" as Master Spenser saith.)
She delivered these _fibs_--for fibs they surely must be--in the short,
quick, _staccato_ manner, perfectly at her ease, and alternately munching
an orange and blowing her nose between every word. She had a solicitor,
too, in attendance upon her--a little wee man, inclining to threescore,
who evidently spent more in hair-powder than in soap; and to him she
appealed at the close of every sentence she uttered--"'Pon my honour it's
true!--there's my solicitor, ask him;" and the solicitor as regularly
bowed his powdered little head in assent.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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