d, 'Muster Gashford agin' all England hollow!'

'Lord George and I were talking of you last night,' said Gashford, after
a pause. 'He says you are a very earnest fellow.'

'So I am,' returned the hangman.

'And that you truly hate the Papists.'

'So I do,' and he confirmed it with a good round oath. 'Lookye here,
Muster Gashford,' said the fellow, laying his hat and stick upon the
floor, and slowly beating the palm of one hand with the fingers of the
other; 'Ob-serve. I'm a constitutional officer that works for my living,
and does my work creditable. Do I, or do I not?'

'Unquestionably.'

'Very good. Stop a minute. My work, is sound, Protestant,
constitutional, English work. Is it, or is it not?'

'No man alive can doubt it.'

'Nor dead neither. Parliament says this here--says Parliament, "If any
man, woman, or child, does anything which goes again a certain number
of our acts"--how many hanging laws may there be at this present time,
Muster Gashford? Fifty?'

'I don't exactly know how many,' replied Gashford, leaning back in his
chair and yawning; 'a great number though.'

'Well, say fifty. Parliament says, "If any man, woman, or child, does
anything again any one of them fifty acts, that man, woman, or child,
shall be worked off by Dennis." George the Third steps in when they
number very strong at the end of a sessions, and says, "These are too
many for Dennis. I'll have half for myself and Dennis shall have half
for himself;" and sometimes he throws me in one over that I don't
expect, as he did three year ago, when I got Mary Jones, a young woman
of nineteen who come up to Tyburn with a infant at her breast, and was
worked off for taking a piece of cloth off the counter of a shop in
Ludgate Hill, and putting it down again when the shopman see her;
and who had never done any harm before, and only tried to do that, in
consequence of her husband having been pressed three weeks previous, and
she being left to beg, with two young children--as was proved upon the
trial. Ha ha!--Well! That being the law and the practice of England, is
the glory of England, an't it, Muster Gashford?'

'Certainly,' said the secretary.

'And in times to come,' pursued the hangman, 'if our grandsons should
think of their grandfathers' times, and find these things altered,
they'll say, "Those were days indeed, and we've been going down hill
ever since." Won't they, Muster Gashford?'

'I have no doubt they will,' said the secreta