It has been objected to this publication, that it perpetuates the ridicule and disgrace to which individuals have, in an unlucky moment, exposed themselves: to obviate this, great care has been taken that names, which are here unimportant, should be either totally omitted, or so altered as to prevent the possibility of discovery; personal satire being in no degree the object of this work;--the persons concerned have then only to keep their own counsel, to be perfectly unexposed to having their wounds opened afresh by means of this inoffensive, and, it is hoped, diverting volume.
MR. HUMPHREY BRUMMEL AND TERENCE O'CONNOR 65
A WHITE SERGEANT, OR PETTICOAT GOVERNMENT 153
JOHN SAUNDERS ON HORSEBACK: A NARRATIVE 203
MR. O'FLINN AND HIS FRIEND'S MISTRESS 273
MISS HANNAH MARIA JULIANA SHUM AND HER BEAU 282
TOM CRIB AND THE COPPERSMITH _R. Branston_ 116
One fine summer's morning, a short, dumpy, sunburnt, orange and purple-faced old man--topped with a clean white night-cap, was brought before the magistrate by an officer, who had just found him trudging through the Mall in St. James's Park, with his breeches on a stick over his shoulder, instead of in their natural and proper place. "This comical fad of his, please your worship," said the officer, "frightened the ladies out of their wits, and made such a hubbub among the young blackguards, that I thought it my duty to take him into custody; but he kicked and sprunted at such a rate, that it was as much as two or three of us could do to get his breeches on again."
"Why do you walk without your breeches, my honest friend?" said the magistrate, in a tone of kind expostulation.[1] "Because I was so hot that I was determined not to be bothered with breeches any longer!" replied the queer old man--twinkling his little deep-set French-grey eyes, and sending forth a long-drawn sultry sigh.
The magistrate asked him something of his history; to which he replied, that he was born at Great Marlow, in Buckinghamshire, where his father was a small farmer. "There was a rare lot of us young ones," said he, "running about the lanes, and paddling in the cool green ponds, like so many goslings. For myself, I was made a shoemaker of, by a gentleman who thought me too pretty for a plough-boy: and so I've been making shoes in London these last forty years; but latterly I'm always so hot and dry, that I can make no more shoes, not I, and I'll take to the fields again."