met him walking along the street—picked him out with her sharp eye in a moment—ran betwixt his legs to upset him—and held on to him like grim Death.”

“Excellent Miss Mowcher!” cried I.

“You’d have said so, if you had seen her, standing on a chair in the witness-box at his trial, as I did,” said my friend. “He cut her face right open, and pounded her in the most brutal manner, when she took him; but she never loosed her hold till he was locked up. She held so tight to him, in fact, that the officers were obliged to take ’em both together. She gave her evidence in the gamest way, and was highly complimented by the Bench, and cheered right home to her lodgings. She said in Court that she’d have took him single- handed (on account of what she knew concerning him), if he had been Samson. And it’s my belief she would!”

It was mine too, and I highly respected Miss Mowcher for it.

We had now seen all there was to see. It would have been in vain to represent to such a man as the worshipful Mr. Creakle, that Twenty-Seven and Twenty-Eight were perfectly consistent and unchanged; that exactly what they were then, they had always been; that the hypocritical knaves were just the subjects to make that sort of profession in such a place; that they knew its market-value at least as well as we did, in the immediate service it would do them when they were expatriated; in a word, that it was a rotten, hollow, painfully suggestive piece of business altogether. We left them to their system and themselves, and went home wondering.

“Perhaps it’s a good thing, Traddles,” said I, “to have an unsound Hobby ridden hard; for it’s the sooner ridden to death.”

“I hope so,” replied Traddles.


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