Page:Once a Week, Series 1, Volume II Dec 1859 to June 1860.pdf/508

26, 1860.]

, for some time I was a sheriff’s officer; one of those trusty agents of the law who have to represent her Majesty under a less gracious aspect than she assumes in her palace at Westminster, or at one of her drawing-rooms at St. James’s. Ay, and I saw a thing or two—a great number of them, indeed—that were not “the thing.” I don’t know that there’s much use to society in laying bare its sores, but I will give you as a sample my “First Ca. Sa.”

I am one of those who, in their time, have played many parts, and as I had just got through two whole yearn as turnkey at White Cross Street —a berth as prosy as it was cozy—the unconquerable desire I have always had of changing an old beat in life for a new one, made me but too ready to snap at the overture of becoming a sheriff’s officer.

Having gone through the little legal formalities usual on such an appointment, I was introduced the same evening to a number of my brother Nimrods at a tavern in Chancery Lane, where the usual weekly meeting was being held of what was called “The Catch Club,” a pleasant term that indicated less our worship of St. Cecilia than certain interesting consultations we there held on the “runs” of the past, and the “meets” of the coming week.

As I knew this to be one of the occasions where free expenditure is not only permissible but politic, I submitted with a good grace to those contributions to the general comfort which at that time were always levied on a “new member;” but my change of employment was too much against me in the higher circle to which I had reached, for any liberality to protect me from another and more galling infliction, a running fire of the little witticisms, or rather chaffing impertinences which, among our people, so commonly pass current for wit.

I remember—to give a specimen of them—that an odd-looking little Jew, a relation of my principal, and, like most of the London-born portion of the tribe, so thick with “barbaric gold and jewels,” that one wondered how they had escaped his nose—had the first shot at me something in this fashion:

“Is’s dooced cuvious, aint it, Jim? ’ow ’ard it it is to some peeples to keep in ’ard places! My hye,—I vinder voo next ’ll be vun of hus?”

“That’s what I say, Mr. Dives,” replied Jim, as he went on like the other, at once amusing and  inebriating himself at my expense. “This here hambition ’ll be your ruin, Mr. Baggs, as sure as  heggs is heggs. Better have stuck to the larder up there at the Cross, and leave us to look up the  supplies.”

“Now, I entertain a different opinion,” pompously interposed a broken-down surveyor, who had not long joined “The Hunt.” “What’s more natural, I say, than as how a gentleman should get  tired of playing keeper to the game, and come out  to have a shot for himself, providing as how his  master permits him.”

Here our chairman of the evening, a weather-beaten old stager, known among us as “sly Mat,” from the clever way in which he accomplished his captures, broke in upon the laughter, of which  this tickling of the club’s vanity had made me the  object, and stretching out his right hand, accompanied by a sibilant “hish,” shouted:

“Gentlemen, I’ve a conundrum. Horder, you gentlemen in the kitchen, down there! Ven does a jay turn into a hen! Vy, ven a Jailer turns Nailer, to be sure!”

“And suppose he turns Tailor,” I replied, addressing myself to the old rogue, who had belonged to that calling, “jailer, nailer, and tailor, would be all the same to a T, eh?”

Undisturbed by the slapping of glasses and clapping of hands that hailed the rejoinder, Mat left the chair, and, making his way to me,—his long pipe in one hand and glass of gin-and-water in the other—slowly surveyed me all over; as if to take my measure, one of them said; and bluntly exclaimed: