40 THE LOVE CHILD. 



life, if an ox had kicked me, my first thought would have been to 

 make my teeth meet in the tough integuments about his heel. 



Finding that I could not lift the ladder, and being in mortal fear 

 of Mr. Merryman, I ran on in the dark, heedless of impediments, 

 and accidentally plunged into a branch passage, which, after many 

 windings and turnings, brought me into daylight at the back part of 

 the booth. It occurred to me that I had better cut a hole with my 

 pocket knife an instrument without which no ragamuffin urchin 

 considers that he exists through the outer canvas, and retire, or, to 

 use a better but more vulgar term, bolt. While debating the pros 

 and cons on this point, and biting my little nails to the quick, I was 

 suddenly and most prodigiously assaulted by an unseen antagonist. 

 I received the horrid shock just between my shoulders and fell prostrate 

 under its influence. On recovering my breath and my senses, I 

 perceived an animal about the size of a ram, with huge horns and a 

 long grizly beard, standing in a belligerent attitude, a few paces from 

 me. It was old Llewellyn, Lavolta's goat, the first of the species I 

 had ever beheld ; my intense dismay at the spectacle may therefore 

 be easily imagined. I ventured to crawl a few yards, but the mo- 

 ment I attempted to rise, the mysterious beast floored me again by a 

 blow betwixt my shoulders. He played with me as a cat does with 

 a mouse. If I ran, he soon overtook me ; and at last I was precipi- 

 tated by one of his assaults down four or five rude steps, through a 

 slit of the canvas into a little room containing some of the oddest 

 people I had ever beheld. 



A woman, dressed like a queen, was blowing a miserable fire that 

 glimmered between three bricks, with an asthmatic pair of bellows. 

 Mr. Merryman was pouring gin into a glass of grouty coffee with one 

 hand, while, with the other, he was dabbing a sponge dipped in 

 vinegar on that part of his leg which had been exposed to the ope- 

 ration of my teeth. In one corner a beautiful young girl, fresh and 

 blooming as a Dryad, was pipe -claying a pair of white satin pumps 

 in another, a fine-featured dark woman, haggard and wrinkled, but 

 evidently not old, distributed a roseate hue over her wan cheeks with 

 a hare's foot. A boy and a girl the former looking grave and 

 important the latter wearing the symbolical ring of matrimony pale, 

 rakish, and depraved, yet ennobled by one expression that of a 

 mother's love for her offspring were feeding a small, ill-tempered, 

 goggle-eyed brat, wrapped up in a sky-blue mantle, powdered with 

 spangles in the shape of stars. In the centre of the place sat a re- 

 markably coarse woman, with two fellows beside her. She had 

 thrown an arm over the shoulder of each. One had a bruised eye 

 and from the blue, tumid, shining nose of the other, blood occasionally 

 trickled : they had, as I conjectured, been fighting about her, and 

 she was reconciling them over a treat of beef sausages, which they 

 ate out of a frying-pan. Immediately on my right a beautiful bay 

 pony, with milk-white mane and tail, richly caparisoned, was occupied 

 in nibbling a large lump of bread and butter, which he had evidently 

 purloined from a lad of about my own age, who was foaming, stamp- 

 ing, and screaming with rage at a little distance. He had nothing on 

 but a dingy night-gown except that a man's neckcloth, apparently 



