This was an awful alternative, which the gallant "General" did not think proper to risk; so gathering up his patents and papers, he put his feather-fringed _chapeau_ upon his head, and taking an ample pinch of snuff--so ample, indeed, that it rushed through his olfactory labyrinth with the noise of a mighty cataract--he stalked majestically out of the office, muttering anathemas as he went.
This was a proceeding under the Pawnbrokers' Act, by which Mrs. Priscilla Williams sought to recover a compensation in damages for the loss of certain property pledged with a Mr. Simmons.
Mrs. Priscilla Williams is a bouncing buxom belle, of five-and-thirty or thereabouts, who, having occasion to raise the sum of eighteen-pence on some sudden emergency, was fain to carry her best black bombasine petticoat--or _bum-be-seen_ petticoat, as she called it--to Mr. Simmons, of Seven Dials, a diminutive elder, who gathereth profit unto himself daily, by lending to the poor: in common _parlance_, a pawnbroker; or, poetically speaking, "_My Uncle!_" This Mr. Simmons received the petticoat; held it up to the light; observed that "it might well be called a _bum-be-seen_ petticoat, for the moths had riddled[15] it sadly;" and finally, he lent the money required; but when she applied to redeem the petticoat, he told her it was lost, and refused to make her any compensation for it.
Mr. Simmons, in his defence, admitted having received the petticoat, and also having lost it; but he declared Mrs. Priscilla Williams had deluged him with abominable abuse; and he humbly submitted that the said abuse ought to go as a set-off against the lost petticoat.
Mrs. Priscilla Williams protested against any such settlement as that. She readily admitted having "blown Mr. Simmons up a bit," and she thought he richly deserved it; for he d----d her and her petticoat too, in the most _notoriousest_ way imaginable:--"I shouldn't have minded his d----g me," she added, "because it couldn't hurt me, but I thought it extremely _ongenteel_ in him to d----n my _petticoat_."
The magistrate ordered that Mr. Simmons should pay the value of the petticoat, with full costs of suit.
Two apprentice boys in the service of a very respectable tradesman in Museum-street, together with a little _night-walker_ were charged by an Irish watchman with kicking up a great big row and clatter, at Charing-cross, at half-past twelve o'clock in the morning; and, what was still worse, with laughing _at_, and using bad words _to_ the said watchman, when he very civilly told them to "be off of his bate;" and "moreover and above, with _inching_ it _backert_ in the teeth of him."