Chapter Tammany Ring to Tappertit of T by Brewer's Readers Handbook

enraptured. He had also a secret notion that the power of his eye was irresistible, and he believed that he could subdue the haughtiest beauty “by eyeing her.” Of course, Mr. Tappertit had an ambitious soul, and admired his master’s daughter Dolly. He was captain of the secret society of “Prentice Knights,” whose object was “vengeance against their tyrant masters.” After the Gordon riots, in which Tappertit took a leading part, he was found “burnt and bruised, with a gun-shot wound in his body, and both his legs crushed into shapeless ugliness.” The cripple, by the locksmith’s aid, turned shoe-black under an archway near the Horse Guards, thrived in his vocation, and married the widow of a rag-and-bone collector. While an apprentice, Miss Miggs, the “protestant” shrewish servant of Mrs. Varden, cast an eye of hope on “Simmun;” but the conceited puppy pronounced her “decidedly scraggy,” and disregarded the soft impeachment.—Dickens: Barnaby Rudge (1841). (See Sylli, p. 1068.)