Mr. Marchant, in reply, said he was inclined to believe his story, but he thought it right he should be told authoritatively that he was not to play such pranks with impunity.
The magistrate, therefore, gave John Saunders a suitable admonition, and dismissed him.
A German mechanic having laid information at this office that a countryman of his, named Schultz, residing in Green Street, Leicester Square, was kept in a state of durance, in his own house, by an Englishwoman, who, he verily believed, had a design both upon his life and property, the magistrate sent some officers to bring the parties before him.
They accordingly proceeded to the house, but the English lady peremptorily refused them admission, and it was several hours before they were able to effect an entrance. At length, however, they brought the parties to the office in a hackney coach--for the lady was too magnificent to walk, and the poor old German was so afflicted with paralysis, that he was carried before the magistrate on the back of one of his countrymen.
He was indeed a miserable object--his limbs utterly useless--his eyes dull and unnaturally protruding--his beard unshaved--his hair matted with feathers--and his whole person disgustingly filthy.
The lady, on the contrary, was a fine bouncing woman, of rather handsome countenance, gaily dressed in a fashionable bonnet and plume, and her fat white fingers covered with glittering rings. Nevertheless she bodily professed that she _loved_ the poor emaciated, dirty, paralytic old man; and she affirmed that all her attentions to him were purely disinterested. He was exactly in the same state, she said, when she first became acquainted with him, five years ago--not worth a single sixpence, over head and ears in debt, half crazy, of filthy habits, lame, old, and impotent--and yet she _loved_ him--loved him for himself alone. ("Oh! who doth know the bent of woman's phantasy?" as Master Spenser saith.)
She delivered these _fibs_--for fibs they surely must be--in the short, quick, _staccato_ manner, perfectly at her ease, and alternately munching an orange and blowing her nose between every word. She had a solicitor, too, in attendance upon her--a little wee man, inclining to threescore, who evidently spent more in hair-powder than in soap; and to him she appealed at the close of every sentence she uttered--"'Pon my honour it's true!--there's my solicitor, ask him;" and the solicitor as regularly bowed his powdered little head in assent.