The Mysteries of the Court of London — page 241: what you’re looking at

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

214 REYNOLDS’ WORKS genius to be placed in! I went wandering about the country in a desperate state, until one afternoon I reached an old deserted tile-kiln, with all the accompanying works in a dismantled and ruined condition. There I found an old man peering about in every corner, digging up the earth, and apparently hunting for something. I watched him awhile from a distance, thinking that he was a treasure- seeker. At length I accosted him. He was at the outset by no means inclined to be communicative, but as I had a pre- sentiment that the encounter would tend to my advantage, I did my best to draw him into discourse. I learned that he was a purveyor of curiosities for one of the old shops in Wardour Street, London, and that he was hunting for old earthen vessels in Warwickshire to save himself the trouble of going to Herculaneum or Pompeii in Italy. There was something in this pursuit which tickled my fancy. I offered to assist him, and I soon dug him out a lot of curious-shaped vessels and broken pipkins, which sent him into raptures. He paid me liberally, gave me his address in London, and told me to call upon him. This interview gave a new impetus to my fertile fancy. I provided myself with all sorts of curiosities, — a piece of the true cross which a cardinal had given me in Rome, a fragment of the holy coat which is preserved at Treves, and which fragment a monk whom I made tipsy had sacrilegiously torn off for my special grati- fication, the veritable cannon-ball which struck the spire of St. Stephen’s at Vienna and knocked it on one side, when the Turks besieged that city, the bullet which slew Nelson at Trafalgar, the identical pen with which Napoleon signed the treaty of Amiens, —Jin short, I cannot enumerate the curiosities, ancient and modern, with which I provided myself while on my journey to London. Then, on arriving there, instead of calling on the old purveyor whom I had encountered at the tile-kiln, I went straight to the shop in Wardour Street, which he had happened to name to me, and I disposed of all my curiosities. But I was terribly disap- pointed at the pettiness of the price which I obtained for them. I really thought that I was playing an excellent game with the credulity of the curiosity-dealer, until on grumbling at his terms, he gave me to understand it was the ideas he was paying for, and not the things themselves, for those he knew to be all humbugs. Then I laughed heartily, CORNICLIOOKS (E(0)