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Ebook has 61 lines and 37171 words, and 2 pages

HOUR THE TWENTY-FOURTH AND LAST--THREE A.M.--A BAL MASQUE, AND THE NIGHT CHARGES AT BOW STREET.

"My bodye is a bankrupt's shop, My grim creditor is death,"

who, like a stern sergeant, lays his hand on my collar, and bids me follow him to jail in the king's name. I wish I were Punch, for he not only "jockeyed" the ghost, but the hangman, and the beadle, and Mr. Shallabalah, and his wife, and the very deuce himself. I wish I were in a land where time is indeed made for slaves, or where there are no clocks to cast honest men off their hobbies.

"I wish I were a geese, For they lives and dies in peace, And accumulates much grease, Over there."

But I am not a Punch nor a "geese," to endorse the touching transatlantic locution, however much I may merit the singular application of the name. I am only your humble servant to command, and this is the last hour of "Twice Round the Clock," so I must e'en essay to make a good end of it.

"The needy villain's general home, The common sew'r of Paris and of Rome."

Three quasi-feminine costumes there are, however, that shall be pilloried here. There is the young lady in a riding-habit, who is so palpably unaccustomed to wearing such a garment, who is so piteously ill-at-ease in it, not knowing how to raise its folds with Amazonian grace, and tripping herself up at every fourth step or so, that she is more ridiculous than offensive. There is the "Middy:" a pair of white trousers, a turn-down collar, a round jacket, and a cap with a gold-lace band, being understood to fulfil all the requirements of that costume. The "middy" sneaks about in a most woeful state of sheep-leggedness, or, at most, essays to burst into delirious gymnastics, which end in confusion and contumely. And last, and most abhorrent to me, there is the "Romp." Romps in their natural state--in a parlour, on a lawn, in a swing, at a game of blind-man's-buff, or hunt-the-slipper--no honest man need cavil at. I like romps myself, when they don't pull your hair too hard, have some mercy on your toes, and refrain from calling you a "cross, grumpy, old thing," when you mildly suggest that it is very near bed-time. But a romp of some twenty-five years of age, with a cadaverous face, rouged, with a coral necklace, flaxen tails, a pinafore, a blue sash, Vandyked trousers, bare arms, and a skipping-rope: take away that romp, I say, quickly, somebody, and bring me a Gorgon or a Fury, the Hottentot Venus or the Pig-faced Lady! Anything for a change. Away with that romp, and cart her speedily to the nearest boarding-school where a lineal descendant of Mother Brownrigge yet wields her birchen sceptre.

A stream of masquerading humanity, male and female, begins to pour through the corridors and so out beneath the portico. It is time. Cabs and broughams--the "swells" came in the broughams--sly, wicked little inventions; policemen hoarsely shout and linkmen dart about.

To the station-house, then, to the abode of captivity and the hall of justice. The complaining postilion and his friends, accompanied by a motley procession of tag-rag and bob-tail, press triumphantly forward. Shall we follow also?

In a commodious gas-lit box, surrounded by books and papers, and with a mighty folio of loose leaves open before him--a book of Fate, in truth--sits a Rhadamanthine man, buttoned up in a great-coat often; for be it blazing July or frigid December, it is always cold at three o'clock in the morning. Not a very pleasant duty his: sitting through the long night before that folio, smoking prohibited, warm alcoholic liquids only, I should suppose, to be surreptitiously indulged in: sitting only diversified by an occasional sally into the night air, to visit the policemen on their various beats, and learn what wicked deeds are doing this night and morning--a deputy taking charge of the folio meanwhile. Duty perhaps as onerous as that of the Speaker of the House of Commons: but, ah! not half so wearisome. For the Rhadamanthine man in the great-coat has betimes to listen to tales of awful murder, of desperate burglaries, of harrowing suicides, of poverty and misery that make your soul to shudder and your heart to grow sick; and sometimes to more jocund narratives--harum-scarum escapades, drunken freaks, impudent tricks, ingenious swindles, absurd jealousy, quarrels, and the like. But they all--be the case murder, or be it mouse-trap stealing--are entered on that vast loose folio, which is the charge-sheet, in fact; Rhadamanthine man in great-coat being but the inspector of police on night duty, sitting here at his grim task for some fifty or sixty shillings a week. Harder task than sub-editing a newspaper even, I am of opinion.

It does not so much matter, for the third hour is gone and past, and as we emerge into the street, the clock of St. Paul's strikes FOUR. There! the twenty-four hours are accomplished, and we have progressed, however lamely and imperfectly, "Twice Round the Clock." Good-bye, dear readers--pleasant companions of my labours. Goodbye, troops of shadowy friends and shadowy enemies, whose handwriting--in praise, in reproach, in condolence, in sympathy, in jest, and in earnest--is visible enough to me on many pages laying open before me at this moment, but whose faces I shall never see on this side the grave. Your smiles and frowns henceforward belong to the past, for my humble task is achieved, and the Clock is Stopped.

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