Page:Knight's Quarterly Magazine series 1 volume 3 (August–November 1824).djvu/471

 claim precedency of entrance. At length, however, Hermes Trismigistus, as the person who might be supposed most familiar with the genus ‘Thief,’ stepped forward and held up a light to examine the two specimens of that genus so recently caught. “But how is this, Mrs. Nelly? The birds are flown: the cage is empty. Or rather had there ever been any birds?” This was the second question; and, after a fruitless search, it was decided in the negative. It passed, ''nem. con.'' that Mrs. Nelly Hagedorn had been guilty of a hoax,—of a hum—of a flam: the whole was too palpably a Mississippi scheme for raising credit; a pure swindling South Sea bubble. And a doubt was moved by Slippery Dick, whether it were not actionable to disappoint people’s curiosity in this shocking way: nay, some held it to be a sort of petty treason to excite the passions of the public, and then baulk them; since every individual in respect to the collective body of the public stands in some such relative of fealty as a wife to a husband, or a servant to his master.

What then had become of the poor prisoners? Had Jove, in compassion to their misfortunes, taken them aloft and made them into some new constellation for the encouragement of future lovers, and the confusion of the present, Mr. Pond?—No: the case was this:—Mr. Ferdinand had been too much engaged in war to have much faith in the absolute impregnability of any fortress,—the gardener’s cottage, he was satisfied, must have its weak points, as well as Gibraltar and Bergen-op-zoom; and wherever an enemy could break in, it was clear that a prisoner might break out. Such a place he found in a little back-window; it was strengthened, indeed, by an apricot tree, which had been trained over it upon an espalier: but a saw, which lay in the window-seat, enabled him to prune a neat quadrangular section out of the espalier, through which he first elaborated his own person; next some unworthy ladder which had been the means of seducing them into the enemy’s quarters; and, finally, Miss Fanny. Like Nisus and Euryalus, they were just returning from their night adventure, and, like Nisus and Euryalus, with the spoils of the enemy’s camp; when suddenly, like Nisus and Euryalus, they heard the enemy advancing directly in their path; and, therefore, like Nisus and Euryalus, they plunged into a gloomy thicket to avoid them.—Here, by the way, an absurd friend of ours, (an attorney,) who is now looking over our shoulder, objects that this comparison is ‘defeated’ and ‘avoided’ (as he calls it in his law jargon), by the sex of one of the parties. The ‘party’ he means is Miss Fanny, whom he pretends that we must not liken to Euryalus. “Nisus”, says he, “may do very well for the cornet, but who the d—l is to do for Miss Fanny? She is a young lady,—whereas Euryalus is a young gentleman.”