Page:Marriott Watson--Galloping Dick.djvu/197



on the third day of November, in the year 1687, His Majesty’s Assizes being then in full session, that I was first clapped into the Jug. Timothy Grubbe it was that managed it, and a dirtier trick never stood to his account. For I had rode up that morning from Uxbridge, after an absence of three months from Town, and no sooner am I arrived than the news reaches me through a crimping-master of my acquaintance at the “Bull’s Head,” that the traps had their paws on Polly Scarlett, she lying ill in the Ratcliffe Highway. There was never a tenterhook alive durst put his nose inside the “Bull’s Head,” where the company was too hot for a regiment of dragoons; and so they must needs find this way to fetch me forth.