MY UNCLE'S GIG.

Star (Christchurch), Issue 1912, 21 April 1874, Page 3

MY UNCLE'S GIG.

(From Sola's " Terrible Tales.") """• (Continued.) My uncle was quite correct in declaring that he liked the road, and that the road liked him ; but the worst of it was, that he liked so many people on the road who belonged to the fai:er portion of humanity. I don't know how many thousands of miies my uncle traversed during his business journeys in the course of every year; but I don't think I am overshooting the mark when I may say that he must have made love to at least one comely damsel for every ten miles he drove. There were no railways, you see, in those times ; so that my uncle's flirtations, if measured by distauce, were many, and not far between. If he had flourished in these iron times, he would have been the very man to get up express flirtations nnd limited mail love-makings with the young ladies who dispense pork pies, and scalding soup, and cups of tea, at the Swindon and Wolverton refreshment rooms ; hut ih the year '28, commercial gentlemen, not yet acquainted witb fast trains, found stage coaches too slow for them, and made their journeys on the King's highway iv gig.-, buggies, and phaetons My uocle had a couple of " traps " — a light *nd elegant one for the sumtfier, a heavy u flair with a hood for the winter, and no le s than three good, sound pieces of prime horseflesh in his stable at Kdgeware. He was the best whip on the Nortii road, and fiom Pinner to Preston there could not have been seen on the smooth turnpike a neater or betterappointed turn : out than his. And, wherever my uncle went he made love ; whether at the little roadside hostelry where he halted to bait , his horses, or at the commercial ' inn where he put up, or at the shop— if there happened to be a pretty girl behind the counter, or a rubicund mistress in the parlour—it was always the same story. He made love to the landladies, to the landladies' daughters, to the barmaids, and to the chamber maids, at every inn in every county in _ England. The grocer's pretty niece quivered with excitement when my uncle Fred came in, pckles, preserves, and sauces on his plausible tongue, but flirtation in his wicked eye. incorrigible was that eye, that the depraved organ had been known to wink at the buxom daughters of turnpikegate keepers as they stepped out to take 'till. He made love to provincial postmistresses through the little hatch in the' post-ufflce window, when he went to ask for his letters. When he was in London, he made love all round : in public house bar-parlours— people were not ashamed of frequenting taverns in ; those days :— in pastrycooks' shops ; in the public streets— yea, even on the >abbatb, coming home from church, would this auda ioua uncle of mine indulge his ama ive propensities. His person I have already described ; and when I assure you that gentlemen used to dress somewhat nattily in those days, and that the ordinary costume of my relative was a. chocolate-coloured body-coat, with gilt buttons, a buff waistcoat, a bluespotted neckerchief, and a neatly-platted shirt frill, with a diamond brooch in the centre, buckskin smalls, top-boots (in London, he wore stocking-net pantaloons and Hessians), a white hat, and a great bunch of seals in his fob, and that he always kept in stock a seemingly inexhaustible stock of the verbal small change which is vulgarly termed " soft sawder," you may imagine that he was just the sort of fellow to get on with the women, and to produce the deepest impressions on their tender heaits. And yet there was no harm in my uncle Fred. He was accustomed, himself, to declare most vehemently that of any evil intentions towards the fair sex he was as innocent as the babe unborn. Nobody could say" that he was i libertine ; but all the women concurred in saying that he was gay. He was supposed to pass the twelfth and thirteenth days pf every February solely occupied in writing valenioe9; and he always presented half-a-cfown ;o the postman who brought him a budget of ove lorn correspondence on "Valentine's dav tself . J . "Love letters 1". my hardened kinsman ised to cry; " Ire got tons of 'em down at

. my place at Edgeware. Locks of hair ? 1 can show 'em to you by the sackful." His male acquaintances üßed to Blap him on the back, and tell him that he was a lucky dog. Young men Btudied my uncle Fred*s " make-up," and took him as a model to dress by. They tried to mould their morals after hia ; but generally failed, degenerating into vulgar, dissipation, or else telling fibs aboui conquests which, with their exemplar, were facts. My uncle, in fact, was unique. li' was a non-criminal Lovelace — a Don Giovanni without guile ; so he said. The women asseverated that he was a monster, a betrayer, a wretch, a vile creature, a cruel and pitiless deceiver ; but tbey continued to return my uncle Fred's winks by encouraging smiles, and he grew gayer than ever. The only thing that gave him concern was the apprehension that, irritated by his incurable inconstancy, a compact organisation of buxom widows and old maids should be formed to seize upon my uncle Fred, and marr,) him by force. But this kind of thing cannot go on for ever. My uncle Fred was destined to be cured, and in a very strange manner, of his addicteduess to promiscuous gaiety ; and the manner in which his reformation was brought about, I shall now briefly narrate. Forty years ago, the environs of London were grievously afflicted with footpads. It seems to me that there is always au average amount of criminality in this world ; that when society is not troubled with a Robin Hood, we have a Dick Turpin, a Golden j Farmer, a Claude dv Val, or a Jerry Aber-j shaw ; that, by way of change for such j ruffians, we only get a Jack Sheppard, a Bill j - tiykes, a Maney, a " Scotty," or a "Veivet* hand ;" — in short, that society is compelled i to pass through prriodically recurring cycles J of outlaws, banditti, highwaymen, bouse- 1 breakers, garotters, and roughs. When thei criminal classes are tolerably quiet, wh eh happens now and then, there arises a nice little war, and peaceful countries are invaded by tens of thousands of cut-throats and ruffians, instead of being ravaged by individual villains, and our lives are sacrificed, and our property devastated, wholesale, and not in detail. Well, our chief social curses in 1868 are the roughs and garotters of Whitechapel, and Endell street, and the purlieus of Westminster. You can scarcely walk from Bloomsbury square to the Strand witheut the risk of being knocked down, strangled, and despoiled of your valuables by some strapping young scoundrel just out of a reformatory school. Railway stations and carriages swaim with pickpockets and cardsharpers ; and if a vagagond insults you in the street, and you secure him, with the intention of handing him over to the police, you are afc once surrounded by a gang of brutal roughs, who hustle and stone you, and would probably murder you if they had a chance. Society is naturally thrown iuto a frenzy of terror and indignation by those outrages ; and we hear of nothing but the necessity of floggiug garotters and roughs, or committing tin ru to penal servitude in double irons for the term of their natural lives. las if we hadn't tried the cat-o'-nine-tails and double irons— ay, mid the gallowc, too — over and over aguin iv bygone times, and with very slight beneflLial results ! In 1828, there was a popular panic, arising from the prevalence of footpads. SixteenBtring Jack *as the last of the highwaymen of the Captain Macheath pattern. Post, chaises were no longer stopped on Finchlev Common by well-mounted vagabonds, in scarlet roquelaures, richly laid with gold, and black visors over their faces, who held a pistol at your head, and, in the politest terms, bade you " Stand and dcliv. r." The :< Your money or your lite " business bad now fallen into thehandsuf mere vulgar rascals, although they too of' en wore masks and carried firearms ; but they robbed on foot, and generally chose for their depredations that time in the afternoon when gentlemen engaged in business during the day were returning to their suburban residences. Thiß was about five o'clock in winter, and eight o'clock in summer, after the streams of waggons and tradesmen's carts had ceased, and before the horse-patrol from Bow-street — the imme diate precursors of the metropolitan police force, which was not established until 18^9 — bad gotie ou duty. The roads surrounding London were at this lime of the day left without protection, and the footpads consequently availed themselves unsparingly of the tempting opportunity. The lady and juvenile inhabitants uf the pretty villa residences just beginning to crop up about Kilburn and Cricklewood — about Highgate and Hornsey — about Fulham and Northend— about Hammersmith and Turuham Green — were kept in a continuous paroxysm of alarm, lest papa should be brought home on a shutter, witb a buliet through his chest, or Ins head broken, and his watch and pocket-buok gone. Nor . was this state of alarm groundless. The era of .the great Europeau wars was as yet too recent ifor the metropolis tb have become free from .swarms of reprobates, who, in the dajs , .before Waterloo, might have enlisted in the army, or, to the great joy of honest folk, been seized by press gangs ; and the sc ence of emigration was iv its infancy in 1828. Be- . sides footpads, the neighbourhood of ,the capital was infested by gipsies, beggars and tramps, and by even a more dangerous and despicable race of villains, the body-snatchlers, or ." resurrection men," who prowled about . suburban churchyards on the evenings ; of ,' funerals, and were beginning to add 'the hideous crime of " burking " to their preda , tory misdeeds. ! V It .chanced one very cold and rainy morning, in the spring of 1828, that my uricle j Ered, having just completed one of his biisiV : nejf*) journey 8 to the West of England, Vasenjoying a y fortnight's leisure, which, he scjetii - na .wJ{h tolerable, .impartiality betweedthis cot o'u^ftS? S^^?i?Y*T*f"T".whicli was guarded, dumh^ Bis aD.ince l :r by J a"deaf old ' housekeeper, 're.' garding whom no scandal could possibly t}}} whispered— snd the "Old Hummums" in Covent Garden. My uncle Fred had been

spending a rery pleasant time. He had been to Drury-laine playhouse once or twice. He had made a bet of a rump and dozen with Tom Archdale, of the Stock Exchange, and won it— l think the bet was about Madame Vestris' ankles — and the rump aud dozen, together with sundry mighty bowls of arrack punch to follow, had been royally consumed at ths " Old Angel Inn," Strand. My uncle was a very steady drinker, and boasted that he could put away two bottles " without turning a hair." I don't know the precise amount of liquid whith he put away on the night of th. rump and duzen — perhaps the arrack punch didn't count — but he owned that he felt rather feverish by the time the party broke up, and they emerged from the old " Angel " — on whose site Danes' Inn Chambers now stand— into the street, t-oda water was not an article of general consumption in 1828, ?o my uncle took a tide rably large bumper of brandy-and-wat , cold, at the bar, to allay his feverishness. There was a remarkably plump young lady, with cherry-coloured ribbons in her cap, behind the bar of the " Angel ;" and if the parting salutation of that young lady to my Uuce Fred did not consist of a slap— quite in fun, you know — administered to one of the black whiskers, and a giggling excamation of " Go along with you, imperence I" all I can say is, tbat the narrator of this history has been grossly misinformed. Tom Archdale, with two or three other choice spirits, proposed a visit to the Knglish ! Opera House to see "Der Freischutz -," but my uncle Fred said he had seen enough life \ for that evening, and announced his intention |of having his mare put to— he always kept a | " trap " at 'i urcingle's livery stables, in | Craven-yard, Drury-lane— and of driving [ home to Edgware. I So he bade his friends good night ; saw the mare harnessed ; and calling at the " Old Hummums " for his white top coat, with three capes— one of the neatest things in the way of a coat you would wish to see— drove through the West End to Tyburn Gate, and so, by the Edgeware road, towards home. It behoves me, as an impartial historian, to admit- that when my uncle Fred announced his determination to quit the choice spirits who had partaken of the rump and dozen, he happened to remember that at the " Fortune of War Inn," Cricklewood, there was an ex ceedingly well-favoured landlady, with whom he was on excell.nt terms, and who would gladly give him a cup of tea, and a steaming bumi er of punch afterwards. So he pulled up the mure at Cricklewood, and had her rubbed down, and then betook himself to the bar-parlour, where the well-favoured landlady was overjoyed to see him — it is true that she addressed him as a '• dreadful, naughty, wicked man," but that was only her fun, you know — and where she made a capital dish of tea, with a round of buttered toast, and a slice of broiled ham — what appetites they had f rty years s go ! — and subsequently served I that steaming bumper of punch of which I have., spoke anon. My uncle Fred was geiting on very comfortably ; and I must say, that his invariable habit was to get on, under any and all circumstances, as comfortably as ever he possibly could. " We must grease the wheels of life ; we must take things easily I" he was wont to Bay when he s> retched bis legs after dinm r, and held up a glass of right old pore to the light. It was about eleven o'clock, aud my uncle was finishing his punch, and beginning to think that ii was about time to have the mare put to, and lesutne his journey, when the J osfrer— the barmaid had gone to bed — put his he d in at the door, and announced that there were three gentlemen in a chaise outside, and ihey wanted two niue-penu'orths of brandy and «ater, hot, 6troug, and sweet, directly. "Why not three nine-penn'orths?" the well-£*voured landlady, who had a keen eye to business, said, as she bustled about, making the necessary preparations. "Perhaps Number Three's a Methodist, and thinks it sinful to drink brandy and water ?" my Uncle Fred suggested, joe sely. Teetotallers were only just beginuing to be | heard of five-and forty years ago. I " I think Number Three's had enough of summat, whatever ifc is," the ostler interposed, with a grin that had an admixture of uneasiness in it. The landlady, a notable woman for pleasing her cust'mers, high and low, insisted on carry i< g the brandy and water to the door herself. My uncle, gal ant us usual, insisted on aixouipauyiug her ; besides, had he not bis mare to sec to ? The ostler followed in their wake with a lantern. " Ihe tall gent fays the 'orse is skittish, and that's why he can't get out," he remarked, as the procession crossed the threshold. (To be continued.)