red by the sounds of a fiddle and
tambourine: the Jolly Boatmen having been duly licensed by the Mayor and
corporation, to scrape the fiddle and thumb the tambourine from time,
whereof the memory of the oldest inhabitants goeth not to the contrary.
Now Nicholas Tulrumble had been reading pamphlets on crime, and
parliamentary reports,--or had made the secretary read them to him, which
is the same thing in effect,--and he at once perceived that this fiddle
and tambourine must have done more to demoralize Mudfog, than any other
operating causes that ingenuity could imagine. So he read up for the
subject, and determined to come out on the corporation with a burst, the
very next time the licence was applied for.

The licensing day came, and the red-faced landlord of the Jolly Boatmen
walked into the town-hall, looking as jolly as need be, having actually
put on an extra fiddle for that night, to commemorate the anniversary of
the Jolly Boatmen's music licence. It was applied for in due form, and
was just about to be granted as a matter of course, when up rose Nicholas
Tulrumble, and drowned the astonished corporation in a torrent of
eloquence. He descanted in glowing terms upon the increasing depravity
of his native town of Mudfog, and the excesses committed by its
population. Then, he related how shocked he had been, to see barrels of
beer sliding down into the cellar of the Jolly Boatmen week after week;
and how he had sat at a window opposite the Jolly Boatmen for two days
together, to count the people who went in for beer between the hours of
twelve and one o'clock alone--which, by-the-bye, was the time at which
the great majority of the Mudfog people dined. Then, he went on to
state, how the number of people who came out with beer-jugs, averaged
twenty-one in five minutes, which, being multiplied by twelve, gave two
hundred and fifty-two people with beer-jugs in an hour, and multiplied
again by fifteen (the number of hours during which the house was open
daily) yielded three thousand seven hundred and eighty people with
beer-jugs per day, or twenty-six thousand four hundred and sixty people
with beer-jugs, per week. Then he proceeded to show that a tambourine
and moral degradation were synonymous terms, and a fiddle and vicious
propensities wholly inseparable. All these arguments he strengthened and
demonstrated by frequent references to a large book with a blue cover,
and sundry quotations from the Middlesex magi