Tom Brown at Oxford. Hughes Thomas
lawk! what a calamity!
Oh, my! what a calamity!
Oh, dear! what a calamity!
Lost and forsaken be I.
I'm out of my senses, and nought will content me,
But pois'ning Poll Ady who helped circumvent me;
Come tell me the means, for no power shall prevent me:
Oh, give me revenge, or die."
TOM, as Mother Patrico
"Pause awhile!
Anon, anon!
Give me time
The stars to con.
True love's course
Shall yet run smooth;
True shall prove
The favor'd youth."
BLAKE, as the Tinker.
"Tink tink, a tink a tink,
We'll work and then get tipsy, oh!
Clink tink, on each chink,
Our busy hammers ring.
Tink tink, a tink a tink,
How merry lives a gypsy, oh!
Chanting and ranting;
As happy as a king."
DRYSDALE, as Silly Sally.
"Joy! Joy! all will end happily!
Joy! Joy! all will end happily!
Joy! joy! all will end happily!
Bill will be constant to I.
Oh, thankee, good dame, here's my purse and my thimble;
A fig for Poll Ady and fat Sukey Wimble;
I now could jump over the steeple so nimble;
With joy I be ready to cry."
TOM, as Mother Patrico.
"William shall
Be rich and great;
And shall prove
A constant mate.
Thank not me,
But thank your fate,
On whose high
Decrees I wait."
"Well, won't that do? won't it bring the house down? I'm going to send for dresses to London, and we'll start next week."
"What, on the tramp, singing these songs?"
"Yes; we'll begin in some out-of-the-way place till we get used to it."
"And end in the lock-up, I should say," said Tom; "it'll he a good lark, though. Now, you haven't told me how you got home."
"Oh, we left camp at about five-"
"The tinker having extracted a sovereign from Drysdale," interrupted Blake.
"What did you give to the little gypsy yourself?" retorted Drysdale; "I saw your adieus under the thorn-bush. – Well, we got on all right to old Murdock's, at Kingston Inn, by about seven, and there we had dinner; and after dinner the old boy came in. He and I are great chums, for I'm often there, and always ask him in. But that beggar Blake, who never saw him before, cut me clean out in five minutes. Fancy his swearing he is Scotch, and that an ancestor of his in the sixteenth century married a Murdock!"
"Well, when you come to think what a lot of ancestors one must have had at that time, it's probably true," said Blake.
"At any rate, it took," went on Drysdale. "I thought old Murdock would have wept on his neck. As it was, he scattered snuff enough to fill a pint pot over him out of his mull, and began talking Gaelic. And Blake had the cheek to jabber a lot of gibberish back to him, as if he understood every word."
"Gibberish! it was the purest Gaelic," said Blake laughing.
"I heard a lot of Greek words myself," said Drysdale; "but old Murdock was too pleased at hearing his own clapper going, and too full of whisky, to find him out."
"Let alone that I doubt whether he remembers more than about five words of his native tongue himself," said Blake.
"The old boy got so excited that he went up stairs for his plaid and dirk, and dressed himself up in them, apologising that he could not appear in the full grab of old Gaul, in honor of his new-found relative, as his daughter had cut up his old kilt for 'trews for the barnies' during his absence from home. Then they took to more toddy and singing Scotch songs, till at eleven o'clock they were standing on their chairs, right hands clasped, each with one foot on the table, glasses in the other hands, the toddy flying over the room as they swayed about roaring like maniacs, what was it? – oh, I have it:
'Wug-an-toorey all agree,
Wug-an-toorey, wug-an-toorey.'"
"He hasn't told you that he tried to join us, and tumbled over the back of his chair into the dirty-plate basket."
"A libel! a libel!" shouted Drysdale; "the leg of my chair broke, and I stepped down gracefully and safely, and when I looked up and saw what a tottery performance it was, I concluded to give them a wide berth. It would be no joke to have old Murdock topple over on to you. I left them 'wug-an-tooreying,' and went out to look after the trap, which was ordered to be at the door at half-past ten. I found Murdock's ostler very drunk, but sober compared with that rascally help whom we had been fools enough to take with us. They had got the trap out and the horses in, but that old rascal Satan was standing so quiet that I suspected something wrong. Sure enough, when I came to look, they had him up to the cheek on one side of his mouth, and third bar on the other, his belly-band buckled across his back, and no kicking strap. The old brute was chuckling to himself what he would do with us as soon as we had started in that trim. It took half an hour getting all right, as I was the only one able to do anything."
"Yes, you would have said so," said Blake, "if you had seen him trying to put Jack up behind. He made six shots with the old dog, and dropped him about on his head and the broad of his back as if he had been a bundle of ells."
"The fact is, that that rascally ostler had made poor old Jack drunk too," explained Drysdale, "and he wouldn't be lifted straight. However we got off at last, and hadn't gone a mile before the help (who was maundering away some cursed sentimental ditty or other behind), lurched more heavily than usual, and pitched off into the night somewhere. Blake looked for him for half-an-hour, and couldn't find a hair."
"You don't mean to say the man tumbled off and you never found him?" said Tom in horror.
"Well, that's about the fact," said Drysdale; "but it isn't so bad as you think. We had no lamps, and it was an uncommon bad night for running by holloas."
"But a first-rate night for running by scent," broke in Blake; "the fellow leant against me until he made his exit, and I'd have backed myself to have hit the scent again half-a-mile off if the wind had only been right."
"He may have broken his neck," said Tom.
"Can a fellow sing with a broken neck?" said Drysdale; "hanged if I know! But don't I tell you, we heard him maundering on somewhere or other? And when Blake shouted, he rebuked him piously out of the pitch darkness, and told him to go home and repent. I nearly dropped off the box laughing at them; and then he 'uplifted his testimony,' as he called it, against me, for driving a horse called Satan. I believe he's a ranting methodist spouter."
"I tried hard to find him," said Blake; "For I should dearly have liked to kick him safely into the ditch."
"At last Black Will himself couldn't have held Satan another minute. So Blake scrambled up, and away we came, and knocked into college at one for a finish: the rest you know."
"Well, you've had a pretty good day of it," said Tom, who had been hugely amused; "but I should feel nervous about the help, if I were you."
"Oh,