in the taproom and by the blacksmith's forge, in the quoit-yard and in
the alley of skittles, and yet, whene'er his tongue led him into
trouble, and there was whisper of peril to that fat form of his, at the
first utterance of a threat, the first sign of aggressive anger, there
was a dissolving view of our Brawnging Bill.

From B to C.--Whenever the fairer sex enter Parliament (breathes there a
man with ears so deaf as to doubt their powers of parlance?) and we have
a House of Ladies as well as a House of Lords, I anticipate that among
the first measures introduced will be a coercive Bill for Regulating in
the Clay Districts the scraping, wiping, and cleaning of men's boots on
their return from the garden or the field. A sore provocation it must
surely be to those who love order and brightness to find slabs of dirt
upon their new oil-cloth, Indian mats, and bright encaustic tiles.
Justly may the gentlest spirit _chunter_ and complain while the guilty
husband, from his dressing-room hard by, vainly essays to evade his
shame by a quotation--"Would my darling have me come bootless home--home
without boots, and in wet weather, too?" Better to give the real, the
only excuse, and say that the soil is so--no, not adhesive, not sticky,
not tenacious, but, to use a word ten thousand times more expressive
than these, so _clarty_.

And do you not remember (on we go, voyaging among the C's,) a time, a
happy time, before you knew what digestion meant, when you delighted to
_cranch_ the unripe gooseberry, until you heard the _clomp_ of the
paternal tread on the _causey_, and crouched lest you should _catch
it_, hid to escape a hiding; and how, nevertheless, swift retribution
followed upon the track of crime, and you suffered those internal pains,
which were vulgarly known as _colly-wobbles_, and were _coddled_, in
consequence, upon your mother's knee?