“THE ACCOMMODATION BILL.”

Such of the incidents of the following narrative as did not fall within my own personal observation, were communicated to me by the late Mr. Ralph Symonds, and the dying confessions of James Hornby, one of the persons killed by the falling in of the iron roof of the Brunswick Theatre.  A conversation the other day with a son of Mr. Symonds, who has been long settled in London, recalled the entire chain of circumstances to my memory with all the vivid distinctness of a first impression.

One evening towards the close of the year 1806, the Leeds coach brought Mr. James Hornby to the village of Pool, on the Wharf, in the West-Riding of Yorkshire.  A small but respectable house on the confines of the place had been prepared for his reception, and a few minutes after his descent from the top of the coach, the pale, withered-looking man disappeared within it.  Except for occasional trips to Otley, a small market-town distant about three miles from Pool, he rarely afterwards emerged from its seclusion.  It was not Time, we shall presently see—­he was indeed but four-and-forty years of age—­that had bowed his figure, thinned his whitening hair, and banished from his countenance all signs of healthy, cheerful life.  This, too, appeared to be the opinion of the gossips of the village, who, congregated, as usual, to witness the arrival and departure of the coach, indulged, thought Mr. Symonds, who was an inside passenger proceeding on to Otley, in remarkably free-and-easy commentaries upon the past, present, and future of the new-comer.

“I mind him well,” quavered an old white-haired man.  “It’s just three-and-twenty years ago last Michaelmas.  I remember it because of the hard frost two years before, that young Jim Hornby left Otley to go to Lunnon:  just the place, I’m told, to give the finishing polish to such a miscreant as he seemed likely to be.  He was just out of his time to old Hornby, his uncle, the grocer.”

“He that’s left him such heaps of money?”

“Ay, boy, the very same, though he wouldn’t have given him or any one else a cheese-paring whilst he lived.  This one is a true chip of the old block, I’ll warrant.  You noticed that he rode outside, bitter cold as it is?”.

“Surely, Gaffer Hicks.  But do ye mind what it was he went off in such a skurry for?  Tom Harris was saying last night at the Horse-Shoe, it was something concerning a horse-race or a young woman; he warn’t quite sensible which.”

“I can’t say,” rejoined the more ancient oracle, “that I quite mind all the ups and downs of it.  Henry Burton horse-whipped him on the Doncaster race-course, that I know; but whether it was about Cinderella that had, they said, been tampered with the night before the race, or Miss Elizabeth Grainsford, whom Burton married a few weeks afterwards, I can’t, as Tom Harris says, quite clearly remember.”

“Old Hornby had a heavy grip of Burton’s farm for a long time before he died, they were saying yesterday at Otley.  The sheepskins will now no doubt be in the nephew’s strong box.”