As soon as he had disappeared, ‘here,’ I said to the girl, ‘take that shilling, and run for thy life.’ The young fellow at the same time pulled his bandages from his face; a scream burst from the girl, he laid hold of her arm, I turned to light my pipe, and the next instant they had disappeared. [Sidenote: _COMEDY_] “I then hastened up the lane in search of my active coadjutor, and met him coming down swearing and brandishing his truncheon. ‘Where are they?’ I said, for I thought I would be first to speak. ‘Where are who?’ he asked. ‘Why, the young Jezebel and that fellow with the broken face?’ ‘Where are they?’ he repeated, glaring on me with his two eyes as if they would have started from his head. ‘Where are they indeed?’ ‘You should know where one is at least.’ I then told him in a somewhat deprecatory tone that I only turned to the fire to light my pipe, and when I looked again both the prisoner and the young fellow were gone. ‘But you are not gone at any rate,’ he replied, ‘nor shall you go until you have been before the justice to answer for this. Come along,’ he said, ‘come this way,’ and laying hold of my arm he reconducted me to the public-house. ‘Heigh ho!’ I said, ‘there’s nothing like taking things easy in this world.’ ‘D—-- you and your easiness,’ he retorted, quite in a rage. ‘John,’ he said to the ostler, ‘go and see if his worship is astir yet.’ John went and soon returned with the tidings that his worship was ready. My conductor and I then went into the house of the worthy magistrate, and were met at the yard door by a set of very cross pointers and cock-dogs, who made a general assault as if they would have worried us, and myself in particular, for they seemed to have barked at my companion before. We were conducted into a neat carpeted room, where his worship and his clerk sat at a table covered with a green cloth, and with a number of papers and writing materials before them. ‘Well, Andrew!’ said the clerk, a thin, sallow, suspicious-eyed person, ‘where is the girl you were to bring?’ ‘Lord bless his honour’s worship,’ said Andrew, ‘I left her in the custody of this here man and he’s let her run away.’ ‘How’s that?’ asked his worship, lifting his eyes from a Game Act which he had been perusing. ‘How did you come to leave her in this man’s charge? I thought you had been an older officer and had known better than that,’ said his worship. ‘May it please your honour’s worship,’ said the constable, ‘I and the girl and this said prisoner, that now is, were awaiting your honour’s pleasure in the public-house, when in comes a scurvy knave as was awaiting o’ the doctor, and said there was a person killed, and I must go and take charge of the corpse; so I ’livered my prisoner into this man’s charge, and away I went arter the corpse; and when I had run up and down o’ the village, I couldn’t hear o’ no corpse, and the people all, sir, a-laughing at me.’ [Sidenote: _MORE COMEDY_]