_Slowgoe._ Impossible! The likes o’ you a guinea-pig! ’Tisn’t in nature. All I ask is, where will you get your taxes? Last week at the great meetin’ o’ the waters, as I call it, at Common Garden Theatre--last week, I stood in Bow Street, and watched mobs o’ people goin’ in, all on ’em conspiring against the revenoo of the country. There wasn’t one there, man or ’oman--and very pretty women some on ’em was, bloomin’ like fresh flowers in fresh water--that wasn’t a conspirator aginst the taxes that pays the sojers and the sailors, and the salaries in Woolwich Dockyard, and the Government never sent the p’lice to take ’em, but let ’em all sport away like the fountain in Temple Gardens. Temperance and cleanliness! I’ve lived to see somethin’! I’ve heard of the age of iron, the age of gold, and the age of silver, and I should like to know what age we are to call this? _Nutts._ Why, by your own account, the best of all on ’em--the Age of Soap and Water. _Slowgoe._ (_With newspaper._) This must have been a beautiful sight, gen’lemen, a beautiful sight, at Portsmouth. Quite makes a man’s heart beat to read about it. _Nightflit._ What’s the perdicament? _Slowgoe._ Quite a solemn thing. Field-Marshal Prince Albert has given a spick-and-span new set of flags to the 13th Foot, or what is called his own Light Infantry. The old ones had been so singed by fire, and torn to bits by bullets in Afghanistan, wheresomever that may be. _Nutts._ Doesn’t say who ’broidered the colours, does it? _Slowgoe._ Not as I see. _Nutts._ That’s a pity. But I s’pose it was some o’ the women. Fine ladies, as wouldn’t so much as take up a stitch in a silk stocking acause they’d think it low and beneath ’em--fine ladies work at flags, and, I really do believe, like the work better than if it was their own baby-linen. _Limpy._ How d’ ye account for that, Mr Nutts? _Nutts._ Why, you see, it’s a part of the finery of sojering; and that always takes the women. And so they’ll stitch and stitch away at colours, and, for what I know, work their own precious locks of hair in ’em, acause they’re to be carried by smart young gen’lemen covered with red and daubed with gold, and the drums and the fifes and the trumpets will play about ’em; and they think that’s glory, poor souls! Silly creturs! if they only thought of the blood, and groans, and mashed limbs, and burning houses, and trodden-down babies, and screeching women, suffering worse than death--if they only thought that their needlework was to be waved and fluttered above such horrors as these, it’s my ’pinion they’d as soon do sewing and stitching for Beelzebub. _Slowgoe._ Don’t be profane, Mr Nutts. _Nutts._ Never was, Mr Slowgoe. But I will say it, I do think there’s a devil sleeping in every trumpet; and he wakes up and bellows out every time the brass is blown. _Nightflit._ And the account goes on to say (_reads_), “The colours were consecrated by the Chaplain of the Forces.”