ut he
said he "knew he was dying," and forgave everybody who had taken part in
the rascally business.

Higgins, the hansom driver, was as good as his word, and after leaving
the place, went direct to the Suburbopolis Police Office, and got the
whole matter reported. Not very long after the police surrounded the
house in Greenfield Avenue, and Provost Goodfellow (who, it may be
remarked, was the only magistrate at home when the affair took place,
and had to be aroused for the purpose), came in all haste to take the
"dying deposition." Meanwhile Dr. Barrister, one of the best of the
local surgeons, was in attendance.

The doctor, however, suspecting something soon after feeling the
supposed wounded man's pulse, and judge of the surprise, to say nothing
of indignation, when the doctor, and then the Provost, began to indulge
in a hearty fit of unrestrained laughter. The "seconds" knew their
business well, for they had _loaded the weapons with blank cartridges
and a few drops of bullock's blood_, and some of the contents of Bob's
pistol had hit Charlie on the brow.

Poor Charlie, he was so terribly shaken and nervous after being hit that
he was long in getting the better of the fright. Like the French
prisoner whom the cruel authorities of the "Inquisition" determined
should be experimented upon as a victim of imagination in the way of
supposed bleeding to death, Charlie, although he had not received a
scratch, thought he was dying fast, till the doctor informed him of the
imaginary wound.

A few days afterwards the affair was "hushed up," and nobody was better
pleased when he heard the true state of matters than Bob Lambert
himself. His friend Jim Campbell had sent a letter to Douglas Post
Office, to be called for, under a fictitious name, and Bob soon returned
to Glasgow.

When little Jenny Black was told the same morning of the duel, that
Charlie Walker had been shot by Bob Lambert, she fainted clean away, and
afterwards refused to be comforted. "To think that she, a poor weak
girl, should have been the cause of such a terrible tragedy," she was
heard to say to her sister, "I'm afraid I'll never get over it." When
the true state of matters, however, was revealed, and the whole affair
brought up in its real light, it afforded immense merriment all over
Suburbopolis, and when football players met to spend a social hour, the
duel between Bob Lambert and Charlie Walker is, of course, alluded to as
a standard joke.

A