* * * * *

“SAY IT WAS ME.”

“Jem! you rascal, get up! get up, and be hanged to you, sir; don’t you hear somebody hammering and pelting away at the street-door knocker, like the ghost of a dead postman with a tertian ague!  Open it! see what’s the matter, will you?”

“Yes, sir!” responded the tame tiger of the excited and highly respectable Adolphus Casay, shiveringly emerging from beneath the bed-clothes he had diligently wrapped round his aching head, to deaden the incessant clamour of the iron which was entering into the soul of his sleep.  A hastily-performed toilet, in which the more established method of encasing the lower man with the front of the garment to the front of the wearer, was curiously reversed, and the capture of the left slipper, which, as the weakest goes to the wall, the right foot had thrust itself into, was scarcely effected, ere another series of knocks at the door, and batch of invectives from Mr. Adolphus Casay, hurried the partial sacrificer to the Graces, at a Derby pace, over the cold stone staircase, to discover the cause of the confounded uproar.  The door was opened—­a confused jumble of unintelligible mutterings aggravated the eager ears of the shivering Adolphus.  Losing all patience, he exclaimed, in a tone of thunder—­

“What is it, you villain?  Can’t you speak?”

“Yes, sir, in course I can.”

“Then why don’t you, you imp of mischief?”

“I’m a-going to.”

“Do it at once—­let me know the worst.  Is it fire, murder, or thieves?”

“Neither, sir; it’s A1, with a dark lantern.”

“What, in the name of persecution and the new police, does A1, with a dark lantern, want with me?”

“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.