gination at least, to emit
faint angry sounds, because the light of day has hurt their eyes, and
the air from the upper world weakened the rank savoury smell of
corruption, clothing, as with a pall, all the inside walls of the
tombs;--Be it a man yet in the prime of life as to years, six feet and
an inch high, and measuring round the chest forty-eight inches (which is
more, reader, than thou dost by six, we bet a sovereign, member
although thou even be'st of the Edinburgh Six Feet Club), to whom
Washington Irving's Jack Tibbuts was but a Tims--but then ever so many
gamekeepers met him all alone in my lord's pheasant preserve, and though
two of them died within the month, two within the year, and two are now
in the workhouse--one a mere idiot, and the other a madman--both
shadows--so terribly were their bodies mauled, and so sorely were their
skulls fractured;--yet the poacher was taken, tried, hulked; and there
he sits now, sunning himself on a bank by the edge of the wood whose
haunts he must thread no more--for the keepers were grim bone-breakers
enough in their way--and when they had gotten him on his back, one
gouged him like a Yankee, and the other bit off his nose like a Bolton
Trotter--and one smashed his _os frontis_ with the nailed heel of a
two-pound wooden clog, a Preston Purrer;--so that Master Allonby is now
far from being a beauty, with a face of that description attached to a
head wagging from side to side under a powerful palsy, while the
Mandarin drinks damnation to the Lord of the Manor in a horn of
eleemosynary ale, handed to him by the village blacksmith, in days of
old not the worst of the gang, and who, but for a stupid jury, a
merciful judge, and something like prevarication in the circumstantial
evidence, would have been hanged for a murderer--as he was--dissected,
and hung in chains;--Be it a red-haired woman, with a pug nose, small
fiery eyes, high cheekbones, bulging lips, and teeth like
swine-tusks,--bearded--flat-breasted as a man--tall, scambling in her
gait, but swift, and full of wild motions in her weather-withered arms,
all starting with sinews like whipcord--the Pedestrian Post to and fro
the market town twelve miles off--and so powerful a pugilist that she
hit Grace Maddox senseless in seven minutes--tried before she was
eighteen for child-murder, but not hanged, although the man-child, of
which the drab was self-delivered in a ditch, was found with blue
finger-marks on its windpipe, b