Had we been inclined to superstition, what a supernatural treat had been the discourse of Mr. Merripall! His tales of “goblins damned” were terrible enough to have bristled up our hair till it lifted our very hats off our very heads. His reminiscences of resurrection men * were extensive and curious; he knew their “whereabouts” for ten miles round London.

We mean not to insinuate that Mr. Merripall had any share in bringing his departed customers to light again. He was a virtuoso, and his cabinet comprised a choice collection of the veritable cords on which the most notorious criminals had made their transit from this world to the next. He was rich in mendacious caligraphy. Malefactors of liberal education obligingly favoured him with autograph confessions, and affectionate epistles full of penitence and piety; while the less learned condescendingly affixed their contrite crosses to any document that autographmania might suggest. The lion of his library was an illustrated copy of the Newgate Calendar, or New Drop Miscellany, and round his study its principal heroes hung—in frames! He boasted of having shaken by the hand—an honour of which Old Bailey amateurs are proudly emulous—all the successful candidates for the Debtors' Door for these last twenty years; and when Mr. Bosky declared that he had never saluted a dying felon with “My dear sir!” coveted his acquaintance, and craved his autograph, he sighed deeply for the Laureat's want of taste, grew pensive for about a second, and then, as if suddenly recollecting himself, exclaimed,

“Gentlemen, we are but a stone's throw from the Owl and Ivy Bush, where a society called 'The Blinkers' hold their nightly revels: it will well repay your curiosity to step in and take a peep at them. Their president has one eye permanently shut, and the other partially open; the vice has two open eyes, blinking 'like winkin' all the members are more or less somniferous; and though none of them are allowed to fall fast asleep at the club, it is contrary to etiquette to be wide awake. Their conversation is confined to monosyllables, their talk, like their tobacco, being short-cut. Their three cheers are three yawns; they sit round the table with their eyes shut, and their mouths open, the gape, or gap, being filled up with their pipes, from which rise clouds of smoke that make their red noses look like lighted lamps in a fog. To the Reverend Nehemiah Nosebags, their chaplain, I owe the honour of becoming a member; for happening to sit under his proboscis and pulpit, my jaws went through such a gaping exercise at his soporific word of command, that he proposed me as a highly promising probationer, and my election was carried amidst an unanimous chorus of yawns.”

“Here” exclaimed Mr. Bosky, “is the Owl and Ivy Bush.”

“No,” rejoined Mr. Merripall, “'tis the Three Jolly Trumpeters. On the opposite side of the way is the Owl and Ivy Bush.”

Mr. Bosky gazed at the sign, and then, with no small degree of wonderment, at Mr. Merripall. The LaurÉat of Little Britain looked signs and wonders!

“I'll take my affidavit to the Owl!” raising his eye-glass to the solemn bird that winked wickedly beneath a newly-varnished cauliflower-wig of white paint; “and though the Ivy Bush looks much more like a birch broom, it looks still less like a Jolly Trumpeter.”

“Egad, you're right!” said the comical coffin-maker; “though, to my vision, it seems as if both houses had changed places since I last saw them.”

The contents of a brace of black bottles flowing under Mr. Merripall's satin waistcoat, and their fumes ascending to what lay within the circumference of his best beaver, might possibly account for this phenomenon.

“Hollo!”' cried the comical coffin-maker, as an uproarious cheer and the knocking of knuckles upon the tables proclaimed merry doings at the Owl and Ivy Bush, “the Blinkers were not wont to be so boisterous. What a riotsome rattle!—hark!”

And the following chorus resounded through the Owl and Ivy Bush:—

We're jovial, happy, and gay, boys!

We rise with the moon, which is surely full soon,

Sing with the owl, our tutelar fowl,

Laugh and joke at your go-to-bed folk,

Never think—but what we shall drink,

Never care—but on what we shall fare,—

Turning the night into day, boys!

“What think you of that, Mr. Merripall?” said the LaurÉat of Little Britain.

We entered the room, and a company more completely wide awake it was never our good fortune to behold.

“Surely,” whispered Mr. Bosky, “that vociferous gentleman in the chair can never be your one-eye-shut-and-the-other-half-open president; nor he at the bottom of the table, with his organs of vision fixed, like the wooden Highlander's that stands entry over 'Snuff and Tobacco,' your blinking vice.”

Mr. Merripall looked incredulus odi, and would have made a capital study for Tam O'Shanter.

“Have the kindness to introduce me to the Rev. Nehemiah Nosebags,” said Mr. Bosky, again addressing his mute and mystified companion.

“Why not ask me to trot out the Pope?” replied the somewhat crotchety and comical coffin-maker.

A peal of laughter and huzzas echoed from the twin tavern over the way, and at the same moment mine host, who was very like a China joss, puffed up stairs, looking as wild as “a wilderness of monkeys,” with the astounding news that a trick had been played upon himself and brother publican by Lord Larkinton, Sir Frederick Fitz-fun, and the Honourable Colonel Frolick, who had taken the liberty of transposing their respective signs. Hence a straggling party of the Peep o' day Boys, whose proper location was the Three Jolly Trumpeters, had intruded into the taciturnity and tobacco of the Owl and Ivy Bush. This unravelled the cross purposes that at one time seemed to call in question the “mens sana in corpore sano” of Mr. Merripall.

“Many men,” addressing Mr. Bosky, as they jogged out of the Three Jolly Trumpeters, “like to enjoy a reputation which they do not deserve; but”—here Mr. Merripall looked serious, and in right earnest—“to be thought tipsy, my good friend, without having had the gratification of getting so, is,

'Say what men will, a pill

Bitter to swallow, and hard of digestion.'”

And the LaurÉat of Little Britain fully agreed with the axiom so pertinaciously and poetically laid down by the comical coffin-maker.

The three practical jokers now emerged from their ambush to take a more active part in the sports. With the Peep of day Boys they would have stood no chance, for each member carried in his hand an executive fist, to which the noble tricksters were loth to cotton, for fear of being worsted. Lord Larkinton led the van up the stairs of the Owl and Ivy Bush, and dashing among the Blinkers, selected their president for his partner; Colonel Frolick patronized the vice; and Sir Frederick Fitzfun made choice of the Rev. Nehemiah Nosebags. The rest of the club were arranged to dance in pairs,—a very stout member with a very lean one, and a very short one with a very tall one,—so that there was variety, without being charming. Each danced with his pipe in his mouth. It was no pipe no dance.

They led off in full puff, dancing about, upon, and on all-fours under the tables. The fire-irons were confided to a musical brother, with instructions to imitate the triangles; and as the company danced round the room,—the room, returning the compliment, danced round them.

The club having been capered within an inch of their lives, Lord Larkinton begged Mr. Bo-peep to favour them with Jim Crow, consenting to waive the jump obligato, in consideration of his previous exertions. But he must sing it in character; and in the absence of lamp-black and charcoal, the corks were burnt, to enable Sir Frederick Fitzfun and Colonel Fro lick (my Lord holding his partner's physiognomy between his palms like a vice—the vice and Mr. Nosebags looking ruefully on) to transform Mr. Bopeep into a negro chorister. His sable toilet being completed, the president opened with “Jim Crow;” but his memory failing, he got into “Sich a gittin' up stairs.” At fault again, he introduced the “Last rose of summer,” then “The boaty rows” “Four-and-twenty fiddlers all of a row” “Old Rose and burn the bellows” “Blow high, blow low” “Three Tooley Street Tailors” “By the deep nine”

“I know a bank” and “You must not sham Abraham Newland”—all of which he sang to the same tune, “Jim Crow” being the musical bed of torture to which he elongated or curtailed them. As an accompaniment to this odd medley, the decanters and tumblers flew about in all directions, some escaping out at window, others irradiating the floor with their glittering particles. Colonel Frolick, brandishing a poker, stood before the last half inch of a once resplendent mirror contemplating his handiwork and mustaches, and ready to begin upon the gold frame. Every square of crown glass having been beaten out, and every hat's crown beaten in, Lord Larkinton politely asked the Rev. Nehemiah Nosebags to crown all with a song. The chaplain, looking as melancholy as the last bumper in a bottle before it's buzzed, snuffled, in a Tabernacle twang,

“The-e bir-ird that si-ings in yo-on-der ca-age.”

“Make your bird sing a little more lively,” shouted my Lord, “or we shan't get out of the cage to-night!”

Many a true word spoken in jest; for mine host, thinking his Lordship's next joke might be to unroof, batter down, or set fire to the Owl and Ivy Bush, rushed into the room marshalling a posse of the police, when a battle royal ensued, and sconces and truncheons, scraping acquaintance with each other, made “a ghostly rattle.” Disappointed of Mr. Nosebags' stave, and having no relish for those of the constables, we stole away, leaving Colonel Frolick beating a tattoo on some dozen of oil-skin hats; Lord Larkinton and Sir Frederick Fitzfun pushing forward the affrighted

Bopeep and his brethren to bear the brunt of the fray; an intolerable din of screaming, shouting servants, ostlers and helpers; and the barking of a kennel of curs, as if “the dogs of three parishes” had been congregated and let loose to swell the turmoil.

“The sons of care are always sons of night.” Those to whom the world's beauteous garden is a cheerless desert hide their sorrows in its friendly obscurity. If in one quarter the shout of revelry is heard, as the sensualist reels from his bacchanalian banquet,—in another, the low moan of destitution and misery startles night's deep silence, as they retire to some bulk or doorway to seek that repose which seldom lights but “on lids unsullied with a tear.” We had parted with our merry companions, and were hastening homeward, when, passing by one of those unsightly pauper prison-houses that shame and deface our land, we beheld a solitary light flickering before a high narrow casement, the grated bars of which told a mournful tale, that the following melody, sang with heart-searching pathos, too truly confirmed:—

A wand'rer, tho' houseless and friendless I roam,

Ah! stranger, I once knew the sweets of a home;

The world promised fair, and its prospects were bright,

My pillow was peace, and I woke to delight.

Do you know what it is from loved kindred to part?

The sting of the scorpion to feel in your heart?

To hear the deep groan of an agonised sire?

To see, broken-hearted, a mother expire?

To hear bitter mockings an answer to prayer?

Scorn pointing behind, and before you despair!—

To hunger a prey, and to passion a slave,—

No home but the outcast's, no rest but the grave!

To feel your brain wander, as reason's faint beam

Illumines the dark, frenzied, sorrowful dream;

The present and past!—See! the moon she rides higher

In mild tranquil beauty, and shoots sparks of fire!

The music ceased, the pauper-prison door opened, and a gentle voice, addressing another, was heard to say, “Tend her kindly—my purse shall be yours, and, what is of far higher import, though less valued here, God's holiest blessing. Every inmate of these gloomy walls has a claim upon your sympathy; but this hapless being demands the most watchful solicitude. She is a bruised reed bowed down by the tempest,—a heart betrayed and bleeding,—a brow scathed by the lightning of heaven! I entered upon this irksome duty but to mitigate the cruel hardships that insolent authority imposes upon the desolate and oppressed. With my associates in office I wage an unequal warfare; but my humble efforts, aided by yours, may do much to alleviate sufferings that we cannot entirely remove. She has lucid intervals, when the dreadful truth flashes upon her mind. Smooth, then, the pillow for her burning brow, bind up her broken heart, and the gracious Power that inflicts this just, but awful retribution will welcome you as an angel of mercy, when mercy, and mercy only, shall be your passport to his presence! Good night.”

The door closed, and the speaker—unseeing, but not unseen—hurried away. It was Uncle Timothy!

Bulky as a walrus, and as brutal, out-frogging the frog in the fable, an over-fed, stolid, pudding-crammed libel upon humanity, sailing behind his double chin, and with difficulty preserving his equilibrium, though propped up by the brawny arm of Catspaw Crushem, Mr. Poor Law Guardian Pinch—a hiccup anticipating an oath—commanded us to “move on.”

Addressing his relieving officer, he stammered out, en passant, “Hark'e, Catspaw, don't forget to report that crazy wagrant to the Board tomorrow. We'll try whether cold water, a dark crib, and a straight jacket won't spoil her caterwauling. The cretur grows quite obstroperous upon our gruel” (!!!)

O England! merrie England!

Once nurse of thriving men;

I've learn'd to look on many things,

With other eyes since then!