Galloping Dick
my whimsy, and for which, as it chance, I was the least fore-armed, was taken in more exalted company, and when I was yet green on the pad. And I here set my pen to the narrative with the more zest, that the man himself being now dead, and passed into sour disrepute, I am enabled to show him forth for what he was—a sovereign fellow, incomparable with a whole line of high-nosed Dutchmen. Maybe ’twas owing to my very rawness that the escapade took so full a flavour and developed so roundly, for, an’ my wits had been a trifle brisker at the outset, and my eyes had plied smarter than my tongue, I might ha’ stopped short, for sure, upon the threshold of the emprise, that, as it was, I slipped into the affair with a plunge, and for all the world like any micher of ten years old; and this was how it came about.
Having gotten into bad odour upon the North Road, and finding the jannizaries peppered about the posting-stages, I rode into London Town upon the seventh of May, armed with fat pockets, and distended, maybe, with a com-
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