draymen. We don't know how he might be with the queen, but he certainly
drove as though he thought nobody had any business in the street while the
Duchess of Dazzleton wanted it. The duchess liked going fast, and Peter
accommodated her. The duke jobbed his horses and didn't care about pace,
and so things might have gone on very comfortably, if Peter one afternoon
hadn't run his pole into the panel of a very plain but very neat yellow
barouche, passing the end of New Bond Street, which having nothing but a
simple crest--a stag's head on the panel--made him think it belonged to
some bulky cit, taking the air with his rib, but who, unfortunately, turned
out to be no less a person than Sir Giles Nabem, Knight, the great police
magistrate, upon one of whose myrmidons in plain clothes, who came to the
rescue, Peter committed a most violent assault, for which unlucky casualty
his worship furnished him with rotatory occupation for his fat calves in
the 'H. of C.,' as the clerk shortly designated the House of Correction.
Thither Peter went, and in lieu of his lace-bedaubed coat, gold-gartered
plushes, stockings, and buckled shoes, he was dressed up in a suit of
tight-fitting yellow and black-striped worsteds, that gave him the
appearance of a wasp without wings. Peter Leather then tumbled regularly
down the staircase of servitude, the greatness of his fall being
occasionally broken by landing in some inferior place. From the Duke of
Dazzleton's, or rather from the tread-mill, he went to the Marquis of
Mammon, whom he very soon left because he wouldn't wear a second-hand wig.
From the marquis he got hired to the great Irish Earl of Coarsegab, who
expected him to wash the carriage, wait at table, and do other incidentals
never contemplated by a London coachman. Peter threw this place up with
indignation on being told to take the letters to the post. He then lived on
his 'means' for a while, a thing that is much finer in theory than in
practice, and having about exhausted his substance and placed the bulk of
his apparel in safe keeping, he condescended to take a place as job
coachman in a livery-stable--a 'horses let by the hour, day, or month'