1830.] The Man with the White Horse. 167 



yarn stockings, brown cloth gaiters ; shoes very square at the toes, as 

 he suffered much from corns ; grey kersymere breeches, with seven- 

 pence-halfpenny in the left pocket, and a metal watch, with black 

 ribbon and brass key, in the fob ; black waistcoat, much stained with 

 snuff j and brown coat. Is supposed to have fallen into the Thames, 

 or the hands of the resurrection-men. 



A REWARD OP FIVE SHILLINGS 



will be cheerfully paid, by his disconsolate friends, to any person who 

 may be able to verify either of these alarming suspicions, or otherwise 

 account for his disappearance. 



Sncoks, Snodgrass, Brampton, and Tooks, Printers. 

 N. B. Hand-bills executed on the shortest notice. 



Then the newspapers teem with articles all headed " Mysterious 

 Disappearance " the police are all activity ; the river is poked from 

 Hammersmith to Blackwall ; lightermen are seized ; coalheavers are 

 examined. The body is found at the end of two months under a barge 

 near Tower Stairs ; the coroner flies to the spot ; a jury is summoned ; 

 the body is identified by a cicatrix on the top of the head, from a fall 

 down stairs, after an evening spent with the Merry-go-nimble Club, a 

 convivial society, of which he was a distinguished member in early life ; 

 the inquest is adjourned, de die, in diem, seven times, for the procure- 

 ment of additional and important testimony, which having been 

 obtained, a verdict of " Found Drowned" is returned, to the infinite 

 satisfaction and edification of all interested and concerned in the protec- 

 tion of life and property, the prevention of crime, and the furtherance of 

 the ends of justice : nay, all is not yet over with the defunct little did 

 he think during his swipy, gin-drinking, grass-cut-smoking, snuff- 

 taking life, what posthumous distinction awaited him what indemnity 

 in fame, for insignificance in existence. We, of the magazines, write 

 him up, and, with the Monthly for a recording angel, he is consecrated 

 to a two-and-sixpenny immortality. 



Alas ! we ordered these things not so well at our side of the water, 

 in the days of which I write. The white horse and his rider returned, 

 as I have said, no more ; the ominous-looking steward gave out that his 

 master had gone on a long journey of the truth of which assertion I 

 make not the slightest doubt and, of course, as in duty bound, entered 

 into possession to keep all things in order until his return ; but, although 

 the unsettled state of the country, the lax adminstration of the laws, and 

 the small estimation in which the solitary man who had disappeared had 

 been held by the neighbourhood, concurred to permit his disappearance 

 to pass without legal investigation yet a whisper of evil, a muttered 

 denunciation went forth among the people. The aged peasants shook 

 their heads as the steward passed, and said that ill-gotten wealth never 

 throve, and that nothing would prosper with him, or his house. With 

 the aristocracy of the country he of course had no footing ; and after a 

 vain and ineffectual attempt to win his way by an affectation of hospi- 

 tality, pompous, and overdone, as is the fashion among upstarts, he, and 

 his establishment, relapsed into a gloom still deeper, and more unsocial, 

 than that of his predecessor. The ominous predictions which are said to 

 shadow a doomed house gathered around him and his, and woe and 

 ruin were prophesied against all who meddled with any of his race, or 



