Chapter 2 - Page 2

dialect, for his ordinary discourse had little
provincialism.

In answer to the queries of his respectable friend, Ramsay groaned
heavily, answering by echoing back the question, "What ails me, Master
George? Why, every thing ails me! I profess to you that a man may as
well live in Fairyland as in the Ward of Farringdon-Without. My
apprentices are turned into mere goblins--they appear and disappear
like spunkies, and have no more regularity in them than a watch
without a scapement. If there is a ball to be tossed up, or a bullock
to be driven mad, or a quean to be ducked for scolding, or a head to
be broken, Jenkin is sure to be at the one end or the other of it, and
then away skips Francis Tunstall for company. I think the prize-
fighters, bear-leaders, and mountebanks, are in a league against me,
my dear friend, and that they pass my house ten times for any other in
the city. Here's an Italian fellow come over, too, that they call
Punchinello; and, altogether----"

"Well," interrupted Master George, "but what is all this to the
present case?"

"Why," replied Ramsay, "here has been a cry of thieves or murder, (I
hope that will prove the least of it amongst these English pock-
pudding swine!) and I have been interrupted in the deepest calculation
ever mortal man plunged into, Master George."

"What, man!" replied Master George, "you must take patience--You are a
man that deals in time, and can make it go fast and slow at pleasure;
you, of all the world, have least reason to complain, if a little of
it be lost now and then.--But here come your boys, and bringing in a
slain man betwixt them, I think--here has been serious mischief, I am
afraid."

"The more mischief the better sport," said the crabbed old watchmaker.
"I am blithe, though, that it's neither of the twa loons themselves.--
What are ye bringing a corpse here for, ye fause villains?" he added,
addressing the two apprentices, who, at the head of a considerable mob
of their own class, some of whom bore evident marks of a recent fray,
were carrying the body betwixt them.

"He is not dead yet, sir," answered Tunstall.

"Carry him into the apothecary's, then," replied his master. "D'ye
think I can set a man's life in motion again, as if he were a clock or
a timepiece?"

"For godsake, old friend," said his acquaintance, "let us have him
here at the nearest--he seems only in a swoon."

"A swoon?" said Ramsay, "and what business had he to swoon in the
streets? Only, if it will oblige my friend Master George, I would take
in all the dead men in St. Dunstan's