dispensed with.

Reader, have you not elsewhere read in the mortal fray between knights,
when the casque has been beaten off, the shield lost, and the sword
shivered, how they have resorted to closer and more deadly strife with
their daggers raised on high? Thus it was with Timothy: his means had
failed, and disdaining any longer to wage a distant combat, he closed
vigorously with his panting enemy, overthrew him in the first struggle,
seizing from his basket the only weapons which remained, one single
vial, and one single box of pills. As he sat upon his prostrate foe,
first he forced the box of pills into his gasping mouth, and then with
the lower end of the vial he drove it down his throat, as a gunner rams
home the wad and shot into a thirty-two pound carronade. Choked with the
box, the fallen knight held up his hands for quarter; but Timothy
continued until the end of the vial breaking out the top and bottom of
the pasteboard receptacle, forty-and-eight of antibilious pills rolled
in haste down Red-head's throat. Timothy then seized his basket, and
amid the shouts of triumph, walked away. His fallen-crested adversary
coughed up the remnants of the pasteboard, once more breathed, and was
led disconsolate to the neighbouring pump; while Timothy regained our
shop with his blushing honours thick upon him.

But I must drop the vein heroical. Mr Cophagus, who was at home when
Timothy returned, was at first very much inclined to be wroth at the
loss of so much medicine; but when he heard the story, and the finale,
he was so pleased at Tim's double victory over Mr Pleggit and his
messenger, that he actually put his hand in his pocket, and pulled out
half-a-crown.

Mr Pleggit, on the contrary, was any thing but pleased; he went to a