As we were leaving the court, a tipstaff came up to Joe Punchard, and formally arrested him as a runaway ’prentice; at the instance, I doubt not, of Vetch himself.  But the matter ended in a triumph for Joe, for Captain Benbow accompanied him before the Mayor and declared that as a mariner in the King’s navy he was immune from civil action.  Whether the plea was good in law I know not.  The Mayor did not know either, and the clerk, to judge by his countenance, was in an equal state of puzzlement.  But Benbow was clearly not a man to be trifled with, and Joe had certainly had a part in bringing the Mohocks to book, and for one reason or another he was given the benefit of the doubt.  When he left the court he was mightily cheered by a mob of ’prentices among the crowd, and would have accepted the invitations to drink pressed upon him but for the peremptory orders of his captain, who was no wine bibber himself, being therein unlike many of the navy men of his time.

The fines levied on Mytton and Vetch were the least part of their punishment.  The incident of the dust bin brought on them open ridicule; they became the laughingstock of Shrewsbury.  The school wag, who afterwards became famous for his elegant Greek verses at Cambridge, pilloried them in a lampoon which the whole town got by heart, and for days afterwards they could not show their faces without being greeted by some lines from it by every small boy who thought himself beyond their reach.  It began, I remember: 

Come list me sing a famous battle,
A dustbin and a watchman’s rattle;
The hero he was nominate Cyrus,
The scene was Shrewsbury, not Epirus.

The rhymester introduced all the characters; for instance: 

Another who the dust has bitten
Was a brawny putt by name Ralph Mytton;
And Richard Cludde, a Cambridge lubber,
He ran away home to his mam to blubber;

and so the doggerel went on, chronicling the details (more or less imaginary) of the fight, the entrance of Mr. Benbow and Punchard on the scene: 

And Nelly Hind’s bashed portal closes
On bandy legs and Roman noses;

and ending thus: 

Carmen concludo sine mora: 
“Intus si recte ne labora,”

which being the school motto (dragged in by the hair of the head, so to speak), pleased Mr. Lloyd, the master, mightily.

The rage of the persons chiefly concerned knew no bounds, and this good came of it, that the Mohocks troubled Shrewsbury streets no more.

Captain Benbow, and with him Joe Punchard, stayed but a few days in the town.  They had come on a flying visit in an interval of the war against the French on the high seas, and very proud we were that the captain, one of ourselves, was winning himself a name for prowess and gallantry in his country’s service.