"You don't mind them, Handel?" said Herbert.

"O no!"

"I thought you seemed as if you didn't like them?"

"I can't pretend that I do like them, and I suppose you don't

particularly. But I don't mind them."

"See! There they are," said Herbert, "coming out of the Tap. What a

degraded and vile sight it is!"

They had been treating their guard, I suppose, for they had a gaoler

with them, and all three came out wiping their mouths on their hands.

The two convicts were handcuffed together, and had irons on their

legs,--irons of a pattern that I knew well. They wore the dress that I

likewise knew well. Their keeper had a brace of pistols, and carried

a thick-knobbed bludgeon under his arm; but he was on terms of good

understanding with them, and stood with them beside him, looking on at

the putting-to of the horses, rather with an air as if the convicts were

an interesting Exhibition not formally open at the moment, and he the

Curator. One was a taller and stouter man than the other, and appeared

as a matter of course, according to the mysterious ways of the world,

both convict and free, to have had allotted to him the smaller suit of

clothes. His arms and legs were like great pincushions of those shapes,

and his attire disguised him absurdly; but I knew his half-closed eye

at one glance. There stood the man whom I had seen on the settle at the

Three Jolly Bargemen on a Saturday night, and who had brought me down

with his invisible gun!

It was easy to make sure that as yet he knew me no more than if he had

never seen me in his life. He looked across at me, and his eye appraised

my watch-chain, and then he incidentally spat and said something to the

other convict, and they laughed and slued themselves round with a clink

of their coupling manacle, and looked at something else. The great

numbers on their backs, as if they were street doors; their coarse mangy

ungainly outer surface, as if they were lower animals; their ironed

legs, apologetically garlanded with pocket-handkerchiefs; and the way

in which all present looked at them and kept from them; made them (as

Herbert had said) a most disagreeable and degraded spectacle.

But this was not the worst of it. It came out that the whole of the back

of the coach had been taken by a family removing from London, and that

there were no places for the two prisoners but on the seat in front

behind the coachman. Hereupon, a choleric gentleman, who had taken the

fourth place on that seat, flew into a most violent passion, and said

that it was a breach of contract to mix him up with such villainous

company, and that it was poisonous, and pernicious, and infamous, and

shameful, and I don't know what else. At this time the coach was ready

and the coachman impatient, and we were all preparing to get up, and

the prisoners had come over with their keeper,--bringing with them that

curious flavor of bread-poultice, baize, rope-yarn, and hearthstone,

which attends the convict presence.




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