Having related these anecdotes in a natural manner, which was the best
warranty in the world for their genuine nature, our friend Waterloo was
sinking deep into his shawl again, as having exhausted his communicative
powers and taken in enough east wind, when my other friend Pea in a
moment brought him to the surface by asking whether he had not been
occasionally the subject of assault and battery in the execution of his
duty? Waterloo recovering his spirits, instantly dashed into a new
branch of his subject. We learnt how ‘both these teeth’—here he pointed
to the places where two front teeth were not—were knocked out by an ugly
customer who one night made a dash at him (Waterloo) while his (the ugly
customer’s) pal and coadjutor made a dash at the toll-taking apron where
the money-pockets were; how Waterloo, letting the teeth go (to Blazes, he
observed indefinitely), grappled with the apron-seizer, permitting the
ugly one to run away; and how he saved the bank, and captured his man,
and consigned him to fine and imprisonment. Also how, on another night,
‘a Cove’ laid hold of Waterloo, then presiding at the horse-gate of his
bridge, and threw him unceremoniously over his knee, having first cut his
head open with his whip. How Waterloo ‘got right,’ and started after the
Cove all down the Waterloo Road, through Stamford Street, and round to
the foot of Blackfriars Bridge, where the Cove ‘cut into’ a public-house.
How Waterloo cut in too; but how an aider and abettor of the Cove’s, who
happened to be taking a promiscuous drain at the bar, stopped Waterloo;
and the Cove cut out again, ran across the road down Holland Street, and
where not, and into a beer-shop. How Waterloo breaking away from his
detainer was close upon the Cove’s heels, attended by no end of people,
who, seeing him running with the blood streaming down his face, thought
something worse was ‘up,’ and roared Fire! and Murder! on the hopeful
chance of the matter in hand being one or both. How the Cove was
ignominiously taken, in a shed where he had run to hide, and how at the
Police Court they at first wanted to make a sessions job of it; but
eventually Waterloo was allowed to be ‘spoke to,’ and the Cove made it
square with Waterloo by paying his doctor’s bill (W. was laid up for a
week) and giving him ‘Three, ten.’ Likewise we learnt what we had
faintly suspected before, that your sporting amateur on the Derby day,
albeit a captain, can be—‘if he be,’ as Captain Bobadil observes, ‘so
generously minded’—anything but a man of honour and a gentleman; not
sufficiently gratifying his nice sense of humour by the witty scattering
of flour and rotten eggs on obtuse civilians, but requiring the further
excitement of ‘bilking the toll,’ and ‘Pitching into’ Waterloo, and
‘cutting him about the head with his whip;’ finally being, when called
upon to answer for the assault, what Waterloo described as ‘Minus,’ or,
as I humbly conceived it, not to be found. Likewise did Waterloo inform
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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