May I transmigrate--when Brahma passes my soul into the parish of St. Brute--may I transmigrate, I say, into a butcher’s daughter’s pet-lamb, if it was not a piteous sight to see Tonio going off between the two law terriers to have an hour’s wearing of that last cravat, which never goes to a laundress, but always hangs upon a line of its own. It must be owned, that he had his whim, but for all the whims that ever were whimmed I wouldn’t have had his crick i’ the neck. Let me, I say, stand on terra firma; I’m content with the look-out I have of life without coveting a bird’s-eye view. Old Haman, when he was forty cubits high, had not a better prospect of this world than I have from the ground floor. Poor Tonio! It was a sorry sight; and if I didn’t pity him, from my soul, may I be an hour behind time for seeing the next hanging bout, and all through getting, by mistake, into a blunderbus. A blunderbus, my masters, is the wrong omnibus. [Illustration: A LEGAL CONVEYANCE.] Well, law took its course as usual, that is to say, like a greyhound after a hare. Tony was put up, so-ho’d, run after, run over, run before, turned, tumbled and mumbled, scud and scut, and gripped by the jugulars. But that’s a scurvy simile to another I have, lapped up in pancakes, so give the calendar a shove backwards, and suppose it Shrovetide, and poor Tony stuck up in dock by way of a shy-cock for the law limbs to shy at. You never saw such pelting in your life; no, not even when St. Swithin took it into her watery head to rain cats and dogs! First, the Foreman of the Grand Jury jerked a true bill at him, that took effect on his head. Thereupon the Clerk of Arraigns pitched a heavy indictment in his very teeth, so that it shivered into thirteen separate counts. Then the Council for the Crown heaved a brief of forty folios into the pit of his stomach; anon opening a masked battery, he threw in sworn witnesses in a volley like bombshells, and when they exploded there flew out from them two melting pots, four moulds, nine bulls, and seven-and-twenty hogs, and every hog of them weighed in evidence upwards of ninety stone. Finally, the Chief Pitcher himself pitched at him his great wig, and his fur gown, and his gold chain, and his mace, and his great inkstand, and the King’s crown, and the lion and the unicorn, everything in short he could catch up, and then, taking both hands, he heaved at him the Statutes at Large; not content with which he took next to pelt him with pairs of missiles at once. For instance, a horse and a hurdle, a gallows and a halter, a shovel-hat and a condemned sermon, a last dying speech and an elm coffin, and, last of all, may I die of the pip the next time I eat oranges, if he didn’t cast at him the whole steeple of St. Sepulchre, death-bell and all, as if it had been only a snow-ball. [Illustration: THROWING THE LASSO.]