The Trail of the Serpent

had each devoured his favourite page, the paper was an utter failure in the matter of excitement, and the window was the next best thing. Now to the peculiarly constituted mind of the Left-handed one, looking out of a window was in itself very slow work; and unless he was allowed to eject missiles of a trifling but annoying character⁠—such as hot ashes out of his pipe, the last drop of his pint of beer, the dirty water out of the saucers belonging to the flowerpots on the windowsill, or lighted lucifer-matches⁠—into the eyes of the unoffending passersby, he didn’t, to use his own forcible remark, “seem to see the fun of it.” Harmless old gentlemen with umbrellas, mild elderly ladies with hand-baskets and brass-handled green-silk parasols, and young ladies of from ten to twelve going to school in clean frocks, and on particularly good terms with themselves, the Smasher looked upon as his peculiar prey. To put his head out of the window and make tender and polite inquiries about their maternal parents; to go further still, and express an earnest wish to be informed of those parents’ domestic arrangements, and whether they had been induced to part with a piece of machinery of some importance in the getting up of linen; to insinuate alarming suggestions of mad bulls in the next street, or a tiger just broke loose from the Zoological Gardens; to terrify the youthful scholar by asking him derisively whether he wouldn’t “catch it when he got to school? Oh, no, not at all, neither!” and to draw his head away suddenly, and altogether disappear from public view; to act, in fact, after the manner of an accomplished clown in a Christmas pantomime, was the weak delight of his manly mind: and when prevented by Mr. Darley’s friendly remonstrance from doing this, the Smasher abandoned the window altogether, and concentrated all the powers of his intellect on the pursuit of a lively young bluebottle, which eluded his bandana at every turn, and bumped itself violently against the windowpanes at the very moment its pursuer was looking for it up the chimney.

Time and the hour made very long work of this particular morning, and several glasses of bitter had been called for, and numerous games of cribbage had been played by the two companions, when Mr. Darley, looking at his watch for not more than the twenty-second time in the last hour, announced with some satisfaction that it was half-past two o’clock, and that it was consequently very near dinnertime.

“Peters is a long time gone,” suggested the Smasher.

“Take my word for it,” said Gus, “something has turned up; he has laid his hand upon De Marolles at last.”

“I don’t think it,” replied his ally, obstinately refusing to believe in Mr. Peters’s extra share of the divine afflatus; “and if he did come across him, how’s he to detain him, I’d like to know? He couldn’t go in with his left,” he muttered derisively, “and split his head open upon the pavement to keep him quiet for a day or two.”

At this very moment there came a tap at the door, and a youthful person in corduroy and a perspiration entered the room, with a very small and very dirty piece of paper twisted up into a bad imitation of a three-cornered note.

“Please, you was to give me sixpence if I run all the way,” remarked the youthful Mercury, “an’ I ’ave: look at my forehead;” and, in proof of his fidelity, the messenger pointed to the water-drops which chased each other down his open brow and ran a dead heat to the end of his nose.

The scrawl ran thus⁠—

The Washington sails at three for New York: be on the quay and see the passengers embark: don’t notice me unless I notice you. Yours truly ⸻

“It was just give me by a gent in a hurry wot was dumb, and wrote upon a piece of paper to tell me to run my legs off so as you should have it quick⁠—thank you kindly, sir, and good afternoon,” said the messenger, all in one breath, as he bowed his gratitude for the shilling Gus tossed him as he dismissed him.

“I said so,” cried the young surgeon, as the Smasher applied himself to the note with quite as much, nay, perhaps more earnestness and solemnity than Chevalier Bunsen might have assumed when he deciphered a half-erased and illegible inscription, in a language which for some two thousand years has been unknown to mortal man. “I said so; Peters is on the scent, and this man will be taken yet. Put on your hat, Smasher, and let’s lose no time; it only wants a quarter to three, and I wouldn’t be out of this for a great deal.”

“I shouldn’t much relish being out of the fun either,” replied his companion; “and if it comes to blows, perhaps it’s just as well I haven’t had my dinner.”

There were a good many people going by the Washington, and the deck of the small steamer which was to convey them on board the great ship, where she lay in graceful majesty down the noble Mersey river, was crowded with every species of luggage it was possible to imagine as appertaining to the widest varieties of the genus traveller. There was the maiden lady, with a small income from the three-per-cents, and a determination of blood to the tip of a sharp nose, going out to join a married brother in New York, and evidently intent upon importing a gigantic brass cage, containing a parrot in the last stage of bald-headedness⁠—politely called moulting; and a limp and wandering-minded umbrella⁠—weak in the ribs, and further afflicted with a painfully sharp ferrule, which always appeared where it was not expected, and evidently hankered wildly after the bystanders’ backbones⁠—as favourable specimens of the progress of the fine arts in the mother country. There were several of those brilliant birds-of-passage popularly known as “travellers,” whose heavy