The Works of George W. M. Reynolds — page 376: what you’re looking at

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

THE SPONGING - HOUSE 309 his wife to make an earnest appeal to her relations for a loan, but here again a negative was experienced. Executions were put into the house at Clapham, everything was sWept away, furniture, plate, horses, carriages, all the emblems, symbols, and appurtenances of luxury and ostentation, away they went. The ruin was complete, and Mrs. and Miss Emmerson, after having cut such a dash in that neighbourhood, were compelled to sneak away in a hackney-coach after dusk, a trunk and a bandbox containing the few articles of cloth- ing which they had been enabled to abstract from the greedy orasp of the sherift’s officers. ‘Then taking refuge in a small furnished lodging in Fetter Lane, so as to be near Emmerson, the unhappy women were taught the bitter lesson of over- weening pride in its ignominious fall. Three weeks, we say, had Emmerson been in the sponging- house, and so far from progressing a step toward emanci- pating himself from his difficulties, each day, each hour, beheld him sinking more deeply down. It is true that he had nearly two thousand guineas about his person, and the fact of which he could not conceal from his wife and daughter, although he begrudged them the few shillings which he doled out for their support. He husbanded every farthing as closely as he could, in the hope of being enabled to settle with his detaining creditor, so as to quit the country ere the forgery should be discovered, for in those times the punish- ment of forgery was death. It was noon, on the twenty-first day of his captivity, that we thus find him pacing to and fro with agitated step in the private room at the sponging-house. Be it remembered that the forged bill was drawn at twenty-one days’ after date, but then there were the three days’ grace, and it wanted then exactly these three days to the time when the dis- covery of the forgery would be inevitable. Three days had the wretched Emmerson to save himself from the scaffold. Heavens, what a brief interval for the accomplishment of so gigantic a task! And the guilty man felt that it was so. Hence the fearful state of excitement in which we now find him, pacing to and fro, turning and turning with a restless, horrible anxiety. He had sent his wife to make a communication to his detaining creditor, which he hoped would have the effect of inducing that individual to come to terms, and he was now GOmMmiicdoo! ‘S (C(O) im