Chapter 23

SWASH-BUCKLER. Bilboe's the word--
PIERROT. It hath been spoke too often,
The spell hath lost its charm--I tell thee, friend,
The meanest cur that trots the street, will turn,
And snarl against your proffer'd bastinado.
SWASH-BUCKLER. 'Tis art shall do it, then--I will dose the mongrels--
Or, in plain terms, I'll use the private knife
'Stead of the brandish'd falchion.
_Old Play_.

The noble Captain Colepepper or Peppercull, for he was known by both
these names, and some others besides; had a martial and a swashing
exterior, which, on the present occasion, was rendered yet more
peculiar, by a patch covering his left eye and a part of the cheek.
The sleeves of his thickset velvet jerkin were polished and shone with
grease,--his buff gloves had huge tops, which reached almost to the
elbow; his sword-belt of the same materials extended its breadth from
his haunchbone to his small ribs, and supported on the one side his
large black-hilted back-sword, on the other a dagger of like
proportions He paid his compliments to Nigel with that air of
predetermined effrontery, which announces that it will not be repelled
by any coldness of reception, asked Trapbois how he did, by the
familiar title of old Peter Pillory, and then, seizing upon the black-
jack, emptied it off at a draught, to the health of the last and
youngest freeman of Alsatia, the noble and loving master Nigel
Grahame.

When he had set down the empty pitcher and drawn his breath, he began
to criticise the liquor which it had lately contained.--"Sufficient
single beer, old Pillory--and, as I take it, brewed at the rate of a
nutshell of malt to a butt of Thames--as dead as a corpse, too, and
yet it went hissing down my throat--bubbling, by Jove, like water upon
hot iron.--You left us early, noble Master Grahame, but, good faith,
we had a carouse to your honour--we heard _butt_ ring hollow ere we
parted; we were as loving as inkle-weavers--we fought, too, to finish
off the gawdy. I bear some marks of the parson about me, you see--a
note of the sermon or so, which should have been addressed to my ear,
but missed its mark, and reached my left eye. The man of God bears my
sign-manual too, but the Duke made us friends again, and it cost me
more sack than I could carry, and all the Rhenish to boot, to pledge
the seer in the way of love and reconciliation--But, Caracco! 'tis a
vile old canting slave for all that, whom I will one day beat out of
his devil's livery into all the colours of the rainbow.--Basta!--Said
I well, old Trapbois? Where is thy daughter, man?--what says she to my
suit?--'tis an honest one--wilt have a soldier for thy son-in-law, old
Pillory, to mingle the soul of martial honour with thy thieving,