The Autobiography of Jack Ketch (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1835 edition. Excerpt: ... CHAFrER VIII. Months rolled on, --to adopt the approved language of the popular Novelist, --and I still discovered myself duly rising every morning out of my miserable lair, to deskant, as Gibbon was wont to say, on my own deformity of secular position; and every night I was regularly to be found in the back parlour of the Magpie and Punchbowl, extracting thence such wild honey as flowed from the lips of its nocturnal visitants. 1 know not, for my own part, whether the desire of novelty or the force of habit be the stronger, but I am disposed to believe that the latter exercised its functions with more complete sway over my temperament, so that I have been at all times attached " to things as they are," so long as they have been endurable, rather than to fanciful and speculative changes, whether in the politic or the corporeal body. Misty, it is true, shortly after my introduction to this retreat, had.abandoned his old haunt, and no intimation of his prolonged existence in the flesh had been accorded to us, save the testimony of Haynes, who had beheld him one evening going into the Italian Opera habited in a manner quite above the available strength of his accustomed wardrobe, and altogether a different man from the " Uncle," who was wont to ruminate over his pipe in the chimney-corner of the Magpie and Punchbowl. And, indeed, were I not hastening to affairs of some special moment, it might not be uninteresting to speculate on the extraordinary change which wealth, or presumed wealth, works on those who are supposed to be basking in its beneficial beams; a metamorphosis only to be equalled by the influence it appears to exercise on others who may happen to be spectators of such prosperous reverse of fortune. It is no less suprising than...