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CHAPTER X.

CONFOUND the Keepers!

Not one of them, Upper or Under, even looked into the room. For any help to me they might as well have been keeping sheep, or turnpikes, or little farms, or the King's peace-or keeping the Keep at Windsor, or editing the Keepsake!or helping the London Sweeps and Jack-in-theGreen to keep May Day!

O, what a pang, sharp as tiger's tooth could inflict, shot through my heart as I remembered that date with all its cheerful and fragrant associations sights, and scents, and sounds so cruelly different to the object before my eyes, the odor in my nostrils, the noise in my ears!

How I wished myself under the hawthorns, or even on them how I yearned to be on a village-green, with or without a Maypole; but why do I speak of such sweet localities?

The

May-day as it was, and sweep as I was not, I would willingly have been up the foulest flue in London, cleansing it gratis. Fates that had formerly seemed black and hard, now looked white and mild in comparison with my own. gloomiest things, the darkest misfortunes, even unto negroslavery shone out, like the holiday sooterkins, with washed faces.

My own case was getting desperate. The Tiger, enraged by his failures, was furious, and kept up an incessant fretful grumble sometimes deepening into a growl, or rising almost into a shriek while again and again he tried the bars, or swept for me with his claws. Lunch-time it was plain had come, and an appetite along with it, as appeared by his efforts to get at me, as well as his frequently opening and shutting his jaws, and licking his lips, in fact making a sort of Barmecidal feast on me beforehand.

The effect of this mock mastication on my nerves was inexpressibly terrible as the awful rehearsal of a real tragedy. Besides, from a correspondence of imagination, I seemed actually to feel in my flesh and bones every bite he simulated, and the consequent agonies. O, horrible — horrible horrible!

"Horrible, indeed! I wonder you did not faint!'

Madam, I dared not. All my vigilance was too necessary to preserve me from those dangerous snatches, so often made suddenly, as if to catch me off my guard. It was far more likely that the brain, overstrained by such intense excitement, would give way and drive me by some frantic impulse manaic into those foamy jaws.

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Still bolt and bar and reason retained their places. But alas! if even the mind remained firm, the physical energies might fail. So long as I could maintain my position, as still and as stiff as a corpse, my life was comparatively safe; but the necessary effort was almost beyond the power of human nature, and certainly could not be long protracted - the joints and sinews must relax, and then

Merciful Heaven! the crisis just alluded to was fast approaching, for the overtasked muscles were gradually give, give, giving — when suddenly there was a peculiar cry from some animal in the inner room. The Tiger answered it with a yell, and, as if reminded of some hated object at least as obnoxious to him as myself— instantly dropped from the cage, and made one step towards the spot. But he stopped short-turning his face again to the cage, to which he would probably have returned but for a repetition of the same cry. The Tiger answered it as before with a yell of defiance, and bounded off through the door into the next chamber, whence growls, roars, and shrieks of brutal rage soon announced that some desperate combat had commenced.

The uproar alarming the Keepers, they rushed in, when springing from the cage with equal alacrity, I rushed out; and while the men were securing the Tiger, secured myself by running home to my house in the Adelphi, at a rate never attained before or since.

Nor did Time, who "travels in divers paces with divers persons," ever go at so extraordinary a rate for slowness as he had done with me. On consulting my watch, the age which I had passed in the Tiger's den must have been some sixty minutes!

And so ended, Courteous Reader, the Longest Hour in my Life!

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Mr. Withering, Gentle Reader, was a drysalter of Dowgatehill. Not that he had dealt in salt, dry or wet or, as you might dream, in dry salt stockfish, ling, and Findon haddies, like the salesmen in Thames Street. The commodities in which he trafficked, wholesale, were chiefly drugs, and dyewoods, a business whereby he had managed to accumulate a moderate fortune. His character was unblemished, his habits regular and domestic, but although advanced in years beyond the middle age, he was still a bachelor.

"And consumptive? Why then according to Dr. Imray's book, he had hair of a light color, large blue eyes, long eyelashes, white and regular teeth, long fingers, with the nails contracted or curved, a slender figure, and a fair and blooming countenance."

Not exactly, miss. Mr. Withering was rather dark

"O yes as the doctor says, the tuberculous constitution is not confined to persons of sanguineous temperaments and fair complexion. It also belongs to those of a very different appearance. The subjects of this affection are often of

a swarthy and dark complexion, with coarse skin, dark hair, long, dark eyelashes, black eyes, thick upper lip, short fingers, broad nails, and a more robust habit of body, with duller intellect, and a careless or less active disposition."

Nay, that is still not Mr. Withering. To tell the truth, he was not at all like a consumptive subject: not pigeonbreasted, but broad-chested—not emaciated, but plump as a partridge not hectic in color, but as healthily ruddy as a redstreak apple not languid, but as brisk as a bee,- in short, a comfortable little gentleman, of the Pickwick class, with something, perhaps, quizzical, but nothing phthisical in his appearance.

Why, then, what was the matter with the man?"

A decline, madam. Not the rapid decay of nature, so called, but one of those declines which an unfortunate lover has sometimes to endure from the lips of a cruel beauty; for Mr. Withering, though a steady, plodding man of business, in his warehouse or counting-house, was, in his parlor or study, a rather romantic and sensitive creature, with a strong turn for the sentimental, which had been nourished by his course of reading — chiefly in the poets, and especially such as dealt in Love Elegies, like his favorite Hammond. Not to forget Shenstone, whom, in common with many readers of his standing, he regarded as a very nightingale of sweetness and pathos in expressing the tender passion. Nay, he even ventured occasionally to clothe his own amatory sentiments in verse, and in sundry poems painted his torments by flames and darts, and other instruments of cruelty, so shockingly, that, but for certain allegorical touches, he might have been thought to be describing the ingenious torture of some poor white captive by a red Indian squaw.

But, alas! his poetry, original or borrowed, was of no more avail than his plain prose against that petrifaction which he addressed as a heart, in the bosom of Miss Puckle. He might as well have tried to move all Flintshire by a geological essay; or to have picked his way with a toothpick into a Fossil Saurian. The obdurate lady had a soul above trade, and the offer of the drysalter and lover, with his dying materials in either line, was met by what is called a flat refusal, though it sounded, rather, as if set in a sharp.

Now in such cases it is usual for the Rejected One to go

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into something or other, the nature of which depends on the temperament and circumstances of the individual, and I will give you six guesses, Gentle Reader, as to what it was that Mr. Withering went into when he was refused by Miss Puckle.

"Into mourning?"

No.

"Into a tantrum?"

No.

"Into the Serpentine ?”

Nonor into the Thames, to sleep in peace in Bugsby's Hole.

"Into the Army or Navy?"

No.

"Into a madhouse?"

No.

"Into a Hermitage?"

No- nor into a Monastery.

The truth is, he opportunely remembered that his father's great aunt, Dinah, after a disappointment in love, was carried off by Phthisis Pulmonalis; and as the disease is hereditary, he felt, morally as well as physically and grammatically, that he must, would, could, should, and ought to go like a true Withering into a Consumption.

“And did he, sir?”

He did, miss; and so resolutely, that he sold off his business at a sacrifice, and retired, in order to devote the rest of his life to dying for Amanda-alias Miss Susan Puckle. And a long job it promised to be, for he gloried in dying very hard, and in pining for her, which of course is not to be done in a day. And truly, instead of a lover's going off, at a pop, like Werter, it must be much more satisfactory to a cruel Beauty, to see her victim deliberately expiring by inches, like a Dolphin, and dying of as many hues, now crimson with indignation, then looking blue with despondence, anon yellow with jaundice, or green with jealousy at last fading into a melancholy mud-color, and thence darkening into the black tinge of despair, and death. It is said, indeed, that when the cruel Miss Puckle was informed of his dying for her, she exclaimed, “O, I hope he will let me crimp him first, skate!"

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