influences of this sight might have been. He had not the least respect,
I am sorry to say, for me in return, or for anybody but the cook; to
whom he was attached--but only, I fear, as a Policeman might have been.
Once, I met him unexpectedly, about half-a-mile from my house, walking
down the middle of a public street, attended by a pretty large crowd,
and spontaneously exhibiting the whole of his accomplishments. His
gravity under those trying circumstances, I can never forget, nor the
extraordinary gallantry with which, refusing to be brought home, he
defended himself behind a pump, until overpowered by numbers. It may
have been that he was too bright a genius to live long, or it may have
been that he took some pernicious substance into his bill, and thence
into his maw--which is not improbable, seeing that he new-pointed
the greater part of the garden-wall by digging out the mortar, broke
countless squares of glass by scraping away the putty all round the
frames, and tore up and swallowed, in splinters, the greater part of a
wooden staircase of six steps and a landing--but after some three years
he too was taken ill, and died before the kitchen fire. He kept his eye
to the last upon the meat as it roasted, and suddenly turned over
on his back with a sepulchral cry of 'Cuckoo!' Since then I have been
ravenless.

No account of the Gordon Riots having been to my knowledge introduced
into any Work of Fiction, and the subject presenting very extraordinary
and remarkable features, I was led to project this Tale.

It is unnecessary to say, that those shameful tumults, while they
reflect indelible disgrace upon the time in which they occurred, and all
who had act or part in them, teach a good lesson. That what we falsely
call a religious cry is easily raised by men who have no religion, and
who in their daily practice set at nought the commonest principles of