Still there was a chance that he made good his retreat.  If he had not paid his fare in Charon’s packet-boat, he might, at least, have crossed the channel in the Trevor or Hillsborough to Holyhead.  Then, deuce was in it, if he did not make a fair run for it, and earth himself snugly somewhere.  ’Twas lighter work then than now.  ’The old saying at London, among servants,’ writes that good-natured theatrical wag, Tate Wilkinson, ’was, “I wish you were at York!” which the wronged cook has now changed for, “I wish you were at Jamaica.”  Scotland was then imagined by the cockney as a dreary place, distant almost as the West Indies; now’(reader, pray note the marvel) ’an agreeable party may, with the utmost ease, dine early in the week in Grosvenor Square, and without discomposure set down at table on Saturday or Sunday in the new town of Edinburgh!’ From which we learn that miracles of celerity were already accomplishing themselves, and that the existing generation contemplated their triumphs complacently.  But even upon these we have improved, and nowadays, our whole social organisation is subservient to detection.  Cut your telegraph wires, substitute sail boats for steam, and your old fair and easy forty-miles-a-day stage-coaches for the train and the rail, disband your City police and detective organisation, and make the transit of a letter between London and Dublin a matter of from five days to nearly as many weeks, and compute how much easier it was then than now for an adventurous highwayman, an absconding debtor, or a pair of fugitive lovers, to make good their retreat.  Slow, undoubtedly, was the flight—­they did not run, they walked away; but so was pursuit, and altogether, without authentic lights and official helps—­a matter of post-chaises and perplexity, cross-roads and rumour, foundering in a wild waste of conjecture, or swallowed in the quag of some country inn-yard, where nothing was to be heard, and out of which there would be no relay of posters to pull you until nine o’clock next morning.

As Toole debouched from Martin’s-row, on his return, into the comparative amplitude of the main street of Chapelizod, he glanced curiously up to Sturk’s bed-room windows.  There were none of the white signals of death there.  So he ascended the door step, and paid a visit—­of curiosity, I must say—­and looked on the snorting image of his old foe, and the bandaged head, spell-bound and dreamless, that had machinated so much busy mischief against his own medical sovereignty and the rural administration of Nutter.

As Toole touched his pulse, and saw him swallow a spoonful of chicken broth, and parried poor Mrs. Sturk’s eager quivering pleadings for his life with kind though cautious evasions, he rightly judged that the figure that lay there was more than half in the land of ghosts already—­that the enchanter who met him in the Butcher’s Wood, and whose wand had traced those parallel indentures in his skull, had not only