The Mysteries of London; or, Lights and Shadows of London Life — page 141: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

as A TTT LIGHTS AND SHADOWS OF LONDON LIFE. 135 following evening, arose from ‘the successive advan- tages Bazzini found he was in a position to com- mand. They had no fear of Celestine alluding to the guests she had so strangely been compelled to entertain during the absence of her protector, and believing the blame of the rebbery would fall upon the servants, or, at least, could not be proved against themselves—a conclusion equally satisfaetory—the two ruflians de- parted to their haunt in town. In high spirits at the result of their adventure, and with yey <pectations of bringing their next attempt to a sim larly successful issue, they spent the remainder of the night in feasting and drinking; and when morning dawned, it found them still “lingering over their cups, and concerting fresh schemes of roguery for the day following. How the project they contemplated came to be baffled in a complete and most unlooked-for manner, we shall shortly have occasion to show. At present, we must turn to other scenes and other characters. rr = 7 |= -_--_—~S a CHAPTER XXIX, THE POLITICAL REFORMER, Tew years before the date of our story, there was a jovial-hearted fellow, the landlord of a little road-side inn near the village of Bradley, whom it would have done your heart good to have known. His name was Jacob—or, as he was then more frequently called for the sake of brevity, “Jack’”—Randall. If you had wauted to have impressed the inhabitants of another | planet with an exalted notion of mundane humanity, | Jack was the very man whom you would have been | proud to have packed up ina small parcel, and sent / as a specimen. You could have desired no better ee pattern of a thoroughly good-natured mortal, and in the manufacture of such would have gladly made any allowance by taking a quantity. He was not one of your uncertain fellows, with a temper like an April day, that varied with every moment, and was only | sunny when there was no cloud to be seen; on. the | contrary, his fancy, like a porpoise, gambolled most in | ga storm; and the more dark and sombre it grew around him, the brighter flashed his lightning sparks of good humour. » “[illuck to-day, better to-morrow,” was his treasured maxim, and if the logical deduction was not always correct, he did his best to make it so, by having re- course to another axiom, that alleged, with indisput- able accuracy, that when matters came to the worst, they were sure to mend. Jack, in fact, was an op- timist of the first degree, and his happy enviable creed had been throughout his own life, and that of “nis father before him, the family belief that ‘ whatever happened’ happened for the best. At this time the great source and secret of Jack’s happiness was his pipe, a quaint old-fashioned meer- schaum, that was his constant companion on all occa- sions, and with which he would not have parted for the wealth of the Indies. The senior Randall, who } hadin his early days made sundry wild voyages to | various parts of the habitable globe, had brought it many years before from some unknown region across the seas; and when the senior Randall departed upon his final journey from earth, the family talisman de- _ seended to Jack as his sole inheritance. Cocker him- self would have been staggered at a computation of eerie ae oe Seca ‘ a ——— ep en — — — - —- oo = - the many pounds of tobacco that had been successively consumed in its bowl, until its very surface had blushed into a sympathetic tawny red at the enormity it had committed ; ‘and as for the smoke it had evolved in instalments of pufling, there would have been amply enough in the aggregate to have occasioned a total eclipse of the sun for the next century. When- ever Jack was in doubt, difficulty, or distress, he flew to his old meerschaum for decision, extrication, and relief; whilst the oftener he was driven to have re course to it, the fonder he became of his favourite, and the more tenderly and tenaciously was it cherished. But if Jack was thus such an inveterate lover of the nicotian weed, it was not that he cared much for the mere ordinary brute indulgence of smoking; his whiffs were those of a philosopher, and he smoked psychologically. His pipe was to him the type of contentment, of sociality, of that interchange of good fellowship which he had endeavoured through life se assiduously to cultivate, It was with him the medium through which he thought, and the vaporous wreaths that iasued from the bowl became thus the shadowy embodiment of 80 many distinct ideas. Nay, he had attained, by constant practice, to such a habit of mingling fumigation with meditation, that the amber mouth-piece became at last endowed with the attri- butes of an oracle, and he studied its responses with the interest of a Delphic devotee. Whilst those around him were tossed upon the billows of popular controversy, and were agitated by the questions that arose out of the constantly changing currents of events, Jack was as cool and placid as a frozen lake, and kept his principles as fixed and upright as a rock imbedded in its depths. He believed in Providence and smoked his pipe, His father had been a pilot, and in that capacity had acquired some little emolument, and mere honours. With the aid of a small legacy, and his own thrifty habits, he had contrived to spend the close of his days in his native place, a small village on the Cheshire coast, where his chief delight consisted in smoking the old meerschaum in his cosy ingle-nook, and narrating stories of the sea to his son, until at last he sank con- tentedly into his grave, and left Jack Randall in un- disputed possession of a snug cottage and the old meerschaum, previously referred to, as the principal bequest. Randall, however, was not an idle consumer of the earth’s produce, without yielding to the earth something in return, and in all the pride of honest handicraft worked hard for his living. Not that he had any especial employment cut out for him, but being a kind of universal adept, willing and able to take any thing that offered, he was rarely without the means of turaing his industry and ingenuity to a profitable account. Love is generally the first turnpike through which youth has to pass and pay toll on the road to man- hood, and if Randall had never fallen in love before he came of age, it was neither for want of temptation nor opportunity, as the prettiest lasses in the village had plentifully provided him with both, Many were the insinuating hints thrown out to him that his attention in certain quarters would be far from being considered disagreeable; but, in a discussion of the matter over his pipe, Jack had invariably found such good and efficient reasons for not availing himself of these privileges, that he had been popularly set down as a hopeless bachelor, when his heart was attacked and captured at a time when he was least prepared to offer resistance, This conquest was effected by a little laughing aa ne (EOTAMELOOOLC (E) a