Roundabout Papers - Penn State University

ON SOME LATE GREAT VICTORIESThackeraynose—which,” &c. &c.; or words to that effect. Betty at52 let me in, while the boy was reading his lecture and,having been some twenty minutes or so in the houseOn the 18th day of April last I went to see a friend in a and paid my visit, I took leave.neighboring Crescent, and on the steps of the next house The little lecturer was still at work on the 51 doorstep,beheld a group something like that here depicted. Aand his audience had scarcely changed their posi-newsboy had stopped in his walk, and was reading aloud tion. Having read every word of the battle myself in thethe journal which it was his duty to deliver; a pretty morning, I did not stay to listen further; but if theorange-girl, with a heap of blazing fruit, rendered more gentleman who expected his paper at the usual hourbrilliant by one of those great blue papers in which that day experienced delay and a little disappointmentoranges are now artfully wrapped, leant over the railing I shall not be surprised.and listened; and opposite the nympham discentem I am not going to expatiate on the battle. I have readthere was a capering and acute-eared young satirist of in the correspondent’s letter of a Northern newspaper,a crossing-sweeper, who had left his neighboring professionalthat in the midst of the company assembled the reader’savocation and chance of profit, in order to humble servant was present, and in a very polite soci-listen to the tale of the little newsboy.ety, too, of “poets, clergymen, men of letters, and membersThat intelligent reader, with his hand following theof both Houses of Parliament.” If so, I must haveline as he read it out to his audience, was saying:— walked to the station in my sleep, paid three guineas in”And—now—Tom—coming up smiling—after his fall— a profound fit of mental abstraction, and returned todee—delivered a rattling clinker upon the Benicia bed unconscious, for I certainly woke there about theBoy’s—potato-trap—but was met by a—punisher on the time when history relates that the fight was over. I do33