ry genteel appearance, and was a Bonnet at a
gaming-booth. Most respectable brought up," adds Mr. Magsman--"father
having been imminent in the livery-stable line, but unfortunate in a
commercial crisis through painting a old grey ginger-bay, and sellin'
him with a pedigree." In intimate companionship with this Bonnet, "who
said his name was Normandy, which it warn't," Mr. Magsman, on invitation
by note a little while afterwards, visits Mr. Chops at his lodgings in
Pall Mall, London, where he is found carousing not only with the Bonnet
but with a third party, of whom we were then told with unconscionable
gravity, "When last met, he had on a white Roman shirt, and a bishop's
mitre covered with leopard-skin, and played the clarionet all wrong in
a band at a Wild Beast Show." How the reverential Magsman, finding the
three of them blazing away, blazes away in his turn while remaining in
their company, who, that once heard it, has forgotten? "I made the round
of the bottles," he says--evidently proud of his achievement--"first
separate (to say I had done it), and then mixed 'em altogether (to say
I had done it), and then tried two of 'em as half-and-half, and then
t'other two; altogether," he adds, "passin' a pleasin' evenin' with
a tendency to feel muddled." How all Mr. Chop's blazing away is to
terminate everybody but himself perceives clearly enough from the
commencement.

Normandy having bolted with the plate, and "him as formerly wore the
bishop's mitre" with the jewels, the Dwarf gets out of society by being,
as he significantly expresses it, "sold out," and in this plight
returns penitently one evening to the show-house of his still-admiring
proprietor. Mr. Magsman happens at the moment to be having a dull
_tete-a-tete_ with a young man without arms, who gets his living by
writing with his toes, "which," says the low-spirited narrator, "I had
taken on for a month--though he never drawed--except on paper." Hearing
a kicking at the street-door, "'Halloa!' I says to the young man,
'what's up?' He rubs his eyebrows with his toes, and he says, 'I can't
imagine, Mr. Magsman'--which that young man [with an air of disgust]
never _could_ imagine nothin', and was monotonous company." Mr.
Chops--"I never dropped the 'Mr.' with him," says his again proprietor;
"the world might do it, but not me"--eventually dies. Having sat upon
the barrel-organ over night, and had the handle turned through all the
changes, for the first and only