“Please, sir, Mr. Brown Bunkem has give him half-a-crown.”

“Well, you little ruffian, what’s that to me?”

“Why, sir, he guv it him to come here, and ask you—­”

Here policeman A1, with the dark lantern, took up the conversation.

“Jist to step down to the station-’us, and bail him therefrom—­”

“For what!”

“Being werry drunk—­uncommon overcome, surely—­and oudacious obstropelous.” continued the alphabetically and numerically-distinguished conservator of the public peace.

“How did he get there?”

“On a werry heavily-laden stretcher.”

“The deuce take the mad fool,” muttered the disturbed housekeeper; then added, in a louder tone, “Ask the policeman in, and request him to take—­”

“Anything you please, sir; it is rather a cold night, but as we’re all in a hurry, suppose it’s something short, sir.”

Now the original proposition, commencing with the word “take,” was meant by its propounder to achieve its climax in “a seat on one of the hall chairs;” but the liquid inferences of A1, with a dark lantern, had the desired effect, and induced a command from Mr. Adolphus Casay to the small essential essence of condensed valetanism in the person of Jim Pipkin, to produce the case-bottles for the discussion of the said A1, with the dark lantern, who gained considerably in the good opinion of Mr. James Pipkin, by requesting the favour of his company in the bibacious avocation he so much delighted in.

A1 having expressed a decided conviction that, anywhere but on the collar of his coat, or the date of monthly imprisonments, his distinguishing number was the most unpleasant and unsocial of the whole multiplication table, further proceeded to illustrate his remarks by proposing glasses two and three, to the great delight and inebriation of the small James Pipkin, who was suddenly aroused from a dreamy contemplation of two policemen, and increased service of case-bottles and liquor-glasses, by a sound box on the ear, and a stern command to retire to his own proper dormitory—­the one coming from the hand, the other from the lips, of his annoyed master, who then and there departed, under the guidance of A1, with the dark lantern.  After passing various lanes and weary ways, the station was reached, and there, in the full plenitude of glorious drunkenness, lay his friend, the identical Mr. Brown Bunkem, who, in the emphatic words of the inspector, was declared to be “just about as far gone as any gentleman’s son need wish to be.”

“What’s the charge?” commenced Mr. Adolphus Casay.

“Eleven shillings a bottle.—­Take it out o’that, and d—­n the expense,” interposed and hiccoughed the overtaken Brown Bunkem.

“Drunk, disorderly, and very abusive,” read the inspector.