ded to stand at bay, 'when bullyers as is wearing dead men's
clothes, and bullyers as is armed with dead men's knives, is to come
into the houses of honest live men, getting their livings by the sweats
of their brows, and is to make these here sort of charges with no rhyme
and no reason, neither the one nor yet the other! Why should I have had
my suspicions of him?'

'Because you knew him,' replied the man; 'because you had been one with
him, and knew his real character under a fair outside; because on the
night which you had afterwards reason to believe to be the very night of
the murder, he came in here, within an hour of his having left his ship
in the docks, and asked you in what lodgings he could find room. Was
there no stranger with him?'

'I'll take my world-without-end everlasting Alfred David that you warn't
with him,' answered Riderhood. 'You talk big, you do, but things look
pretty black against yourself, to my thinking. You charge again' me that
George Radfoot got lost sight of, and was no more thought of. What's
that for a sailor? Why there's fifty such, out of sight and out of
mind, ten times as long as him--through entering in different names,
re-shipping when the out'ard voyage is made, and what not--a turning
up to light every day about here, and no matter made of it. Ask my
daughter. You could go on Poll Parroting enough with her, when I warn't
come in: Poll Parrot a little with her on this pint. You and your
suspicions of my suspicions of him! What are my suspicions of you? You
tell me George Radfoot got killed. I ask you who done it and how you
know it. You carry his knife and you wear his coat. I ask you how you
come by 'em? Hand over that there bottle!' Here Mr Riderhood appeared
to labour under a virtuous delusion that it was his own property. 'And
you,' he added, turning to his daughter, as he filled the footless
glass, 'if it warn't wasting good sherry wine on you, I'd chuck this at
you, for Poll Parroting with this man. It's along of Poll Parroting
that such like as him gets their suspicions, whereas I gets mine by
argueyment, and being nat'rally a honest man, and sweating away at the
brow as a honest man ought.' Here he filled the footless goblet again,
and stood chewing one half of its contents and looking down into the
other as he slowly rolled the wine about in the glass; while Pleasant,
whose sympathetic hair had come down on her being apostrophised,
rearranged it, much in the style of th