English essays -- 19th century; Great Britain -- Social life and customs; London (England) -- Description and travel
That intelligent reader, with his hand following the line as he read
it out to his audience, was saying:--“And--now--Tom--coming up
smiling--after his fall--dee--delivered a rattling clinker upon
the Benicia Boy's--potato-trap--but was met by a--punisher on the
nose--which,” &c. &c.; or words to that effect. Betty at 52 let me
in, while the boy was reading his lecture and, having been some twenty
minutes or so in the house and paid my visit, I took leave.
The little lecturer was still at work on the 51 doorstep, and his
audience had scarcely changed their position. Having read every word of
the battle myself in the morning, I did not stay to listen further;
but if the gentleman who expected his paper at the usual hour that day
experienced delay and a little disappointment I shall not be surprised.
I am not going to expatiate on the battle. I have read in the
correspondent's letter of a Northern newspaper, that in the midst of the
company assembled the reader's humble servant was present, and in a very
polite society, too, of “poets, clergymen, men of letters, and members
of both Houses of Parliament.” If so, I must have walked to the station
in my sleep, paid three guineas in a profound fit of mental abstraction,
and returned to bed unconscious, for I certainly woke there about the
time when history relates that the fight was over. I do not know whose
colors I wore--the Benician's, or those of the Irish champion; nor
remember where the fight took place, which, indeed, no somnambulist is
bound to recollect. Ought Mr. Sayers to be honored for being brave, or
punished for being naughty? By the shade of Brutus the elder, I don't
know.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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