mpregnable ring, yet of sufficient
dimensions to avoid the missiles. _"Go it, red-head!" "Bravo! white
apron!"_ resounded on every side. Draughts now met draughts in their
passage through the circumambient air, and exploded like shells over a
besieged town. Bolusses were fired with the precision of cannon shot,
pill-boxes were thrown with such force that they burst like grape and
canister, while acids and alkalies hissed, as they neutralised each
other's power, with all the venom of expiring snakes, "Bravo! white
apron!" "Red-head for ever!" resounded on every side as the conflict
continued with unabated vigour. The ammunition was fast expending on
both sides, when Mr Ebenezer Pleggit, hearing the noise, and perhaps
smelling his own drugs, was so unfortunately rash and so unwisely
foolhardy, as to break through the sacred ring, advancing from behind
with uplifted cane to fell the redoubtable Timothy, when a mixture of
his own, hurled by his own red-haired champion, caught him in his open
mouth, breaking against his only two remaining front teeth, extracting
them as the discharged liquid ran down his throat, and turning him as
sick as a dog. He fell, was taken away on a shutter, and it was some
days before he was again to be seen in his shop, dispensing those
medicines which, on this fatal occasion, he would but too gladly have
dispensed with.

Reader, have you not elsewhere read in the mortal fray between knights,
when the casque has been beaten off, the shield lost, and the sword
shivered, how they have resorted to closer and more deadly strife with
their daggers raised on high? Thus it was with Timothy: his means had
failed, and disdaining any longer to wage a distant combat, he closed
vigorously with his panting enemy, overthrew him in the first struggle,
seizing from his basket the only weapons which remained, one single
vial, and one single box of pills. As he sat upon his prostrate foe,
first he forced the box of pills into his gasping mouth, and then with
the lower end of the vial he drove it down his throat, as a gunner rams
home the wad and shot into a thirty-two pound carronade. Choked with the
box, the fallen knight held up his hands for quarter; but Timothy
continued until the end of the vial breaking out the top and bottom of
the pasteboard receptacle, forty-and-eight of antibilious pills rolled
in haste down Red-head's throat. Timothy then seized his basket, and
amid the shouts of triumph, walked away. His