They didn't give
it him, though, and then he got very fond of his country all at
once, and went about saying that gas was a death-blow to his native
land, and that it was a plot of the radicals to ruin the country
and destroy the oil and cotton trade for ever, and that the whales
would go and kill themselves privately, out of sheer spite and
vexation at not being caught. At last he got right-down cracked;
called his tobacco-pipe a gas-pipe; thought his tears were lamp-
oil; and went on with all manner of nonsense of that sort, till one
night he hung himself on a lamp-iron in Saint Martin's Lane, and
there was an end of HIM.
'Tom loved him, gentlemen, but he survived it. He shed a tear over
his grave, got very drunk, spoke a funeral oration that night in
the watch-house, and was fined five shillings for it, in the
morning. Some men are none the worse for this sort of thing. Tom
was one of 'em. He went that very afternoon on a new beat: as
clear in his head, and as free from fever as Father Mathew himself.
'Tom's new beat, gentlemen, was - I can't exactly say where, for
that he'd never tell; but I know it was in a quiet part of town,
where there were some queer old houses. I have always had it in my
head that it must have been somewhere near Canonbury Tower in
Islington, but that's a matter of opinion. Wherever it was, he
went upon it, with a bran-new ladder, a white hat, a brown holland
jacket and trousers, a blue neck-kerchief, and a sprig of full-
blown double wall-flower in his button-hole. Tom was always
genteel in his appearance, and I have heard from the best judges,
that if he had left his ladder at home that afternoon, you might
have took him for a lord.
'He was always merry, was Tom, and such a singer, that if there was
any encouragement for native talent, he'd have been at the opera.
He was on his ladder, lighting his first lamp, and singing to
himself in a manner more easily to be conceived than described,
when he hears the clock strike five, and suddenly sees an old
gentleman with a telescope in his hand, throw up a window and look
at him very hard.
'Tom didn't know what could be passing in this old gentleman's
mind. He thought it likely enough that he might be saying within
himself, "Here's a new lamplighter - a good-looking young fellow -
shall I stand something to drink?" Thinking this possible, he
keeps quite still, pretending to be very particular about the wick,
and looks at the old gentleman sideways, seeming to take no notice
of him.
'Gentlemen, he was one of the strangest and most mysterious-looking
files that ever Tom clapped his eyes on. He was dressed all
slovenly and untidy, in a great gown of a kind of bed-furniture
pattern, with a cap of the same on his head; and a long old flapped
waistcoat; with no braces, no strings, very few buttons - in short,
with hardly any of those artificial contrivances that hold society
together. Tom knew by these signs, and by his not being shaved,
and by his not being over-clean, and by a sort of wisdom not quite
awake, in his face, that he was a scientific old gentleman. He
often told me that if he could have conceived the possibility of
the whole Royal Society being boiled down into one man, he should
have said the old gentleman's body was that Body.
'The old gentleman claps the telescope to his eye, looks all round,
sees nobody else in sight, stares at Tom again, and cries out very
loud:
'"Hal-loa!"
'"Halloa, Sir," says Tom from the ladder; "and halloa again, if you
come to that."
'"Here's an extraordinary fulfilment," says the old gentleman, "of
a prediction of the planets."
'"Is there?" says Tom.
