Page:Dickens - A Child s History of England, 1900.djvu/565

Rh known that there were accommodating gentlemen in the habit of furnishing new members with temporary qualifications, to the ownership of which they swore solemnly, of course, as a mere matter of form. He argued from these data that it was wholly unnecessary for members of parliament to possess any property at all, especially as, when they had none, the public could get them so much cheaper.

"A paper was read by the secretary, descriptive of a bay pony with one eye, which had been seen by the author standing in a butcher's cart standing at the corner of Newgate Market. The communication described the author of the paper as having in the prosecution of a mercantile pursuit, betaken himself one Saturday morning last summer from Somers Town to Cheapside; in the course of which expedition he had beheld the extraordinary appearance above described. The pony had one distinct eye; it had been pointed out by his friend Captain Blunderbore of the Horse Marines, who assisted the author in his search, that whenever he winked his eye he whisked his tail, possibly to drive the flies off, but that he always winked and whisked at the same time. The animal was lean, spavined and tottering; and the author proposed to constitute it of the family of Fltfordogsmeataurious. It certainly did occur to him that there was no case on record of a pony with one clearly defined and distinct organ of vision, winking and whisking at the same moment.

"Mr. Q. J. Snuffletoffle had heard of a pony winking his eye, and likewise of a pony whisking his tail, but whether they were two ponies or the same pony he could not undertake positively to say. At all events he was acquainted with no authenticated instance of a simultaneous winking and whisking, and he really could not but doubt the existence of such a marvellous pony in opposition to all those natural laws by which ponies were governed, deferring, however, to the mere question of his one organ of vision, might he suggest the possibility