The Mysteries of the Court of London — page 233: what you’re looking at

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

206 REYNOLDS’ WORKS a word, the contents of these two rooms were of the most miscellaneous and no doubt of a very curious description. By the light of a solitary candle in the front apartment Mr. Bealby was drinking gin and water with a friend. This friend was many years younger than himself; indeed, he was not more than five or six and twenty, but he had asickly, dissipated look, as if he were much better acquainted with the alcoholic mixture which he was now imbibing than with regular and wholesome meals. He was exceedingly shabby in his apparel, and by the state of his linen appeared to possess the confidence of his washerwoman to a much smaller degree than did even Mr. Bealby himself. This in- dividual bore the surname of Limber, but amongst his friends and equals he was more familiarly known by the diminutive of his Christian name of Benjamin. We should observe that Mr. Bealby had been out to pass the evening at a free-and-easy, where he had partaken of a chop and a baked potato, thereby, to use his own highly- expressive language, knocking dinner, tea, and supper all into one. At this free-and-easy he had encountered Mr. Limber, who was an old acquaintance, but whom he had not seen for some few years. Remembering that he had a little credit at the public-house nearly facing his lodging in Bow Street, and that this credit was good to the extent of a bottle of gin and half a dozen cigars, Mr. Bealby invited his friend home to partake of those refreshments, observing that “ as they had a great deal to say to each other, they might just © as well quaff their blue-ruin and smoke their weeds at his rooms.”’ Thither therefore they repaired from the free-and- easy; the gin and the cigars were procured from the public- house aforesaid, and it happened that just at the time the Burker was engaged in climbing up the pipe, Mr. Bealby and Mr. Limber were sitting down to enjoy themselves in the apartment of the former. Mr. Limber was prepared by some little conversation during the walk from the free-and-easy to find his friend’s rooms crammed with strange objects, and therefore on en- tering these apartments he was not so much astonished as he would have been if suddenly introduced thither without any previous information on the point. At the same time, being somewhat of a nervous temperament, Ben Limber liked the aspect of the mummy and the skeleton as little as possi- ECORNICLIOOKS (E(0)