CHAPTER XXVI.

THE LIEUTENANT'S TALE.

In the centre of the little borough of Buyemup stood what was, if not facetiously, certainly very inappropriately, called the Town Hall. It was a small dilapidated building, in shape like an old barn. The lower part was open, and surrounded by arches of rough stone. The upper part, which was supported by these stone arches, was built of beams and uprights of rough dark oak. The interstices were filled up with semicircular red tiles, overlapping one another. The whole had once been protected by a roof of coarse, thick slates, that would have certainly been macadamized in these days as excellent materials for road-making from their firmness and solidity.

At one end of the roof were the remains of

what had been a clock-turret and belfry. The turret was now a pigeon-house, decay having saved the carpenter the trouble of drilling holes in it for its feathered occupiers to obtain ingress and egress. The clock had been removed and sold for old iron all but its face and hands, which, like most schoolboys' faces and hands, were very black and dirty. The bell still hung suspended from the beam, but was useless for all tintinnabulary purposes. It was as noiseless as any lady with a quinsey, and from the same cause—it had lost the use of its clapper. This had, after swing-swinging backwards and forwards for many years, flung itself off in disgust, I suppose, at being pulled about so, and forced its way through the ceiling and floor below into the arched building.

This building was called and still used as a Market House. There the beadle of the borough established his head-quarters, especially in wet weather. He assigned as a reason for so doing, not that it was snugger to be under cover in case of rain or falling weather of every kind, but that, as the Town Hall was in the

centre of the borough, and commanded the vistas of the four streets that led to it from the four quarters of the compass as to one common centre, he could be seen by and see all the vagabonds that ventured to intrude into its precincts in spite of the boards fixed outside the town at the ends

termini I ought to write of the four principal

streets, which assured them in language, strong though not polite, that they would all be "persecuted by order of the mayor."

Mr. Litigious Graspem, the beadle of Buyemur, had often dreaded lest, in ringing this bell, which it was his duty to do at eight o'clock every morning and night, the clapper, which was evidently hanging by its last thread, should descend and injure his important person. He wished it would descend, as he disliked his matutinal and vespertinal duty, for which he had the paltry pay of fifty-two shillings per annum; and he knew that the corporation would not go to the expense of a new one. One day, about twenty years before the events I have recorded in the last chapter took place, Litigious was at his usual employment, walking leisurely backwards

and forwards, staff in hand, and dressed in a beadle's blue coat with long skirts, a beefsteak collar and cuffs. He frowned most awfully at every little urchin who peeped in and eyed him, the nice dry floor of the hall, and a bag of marbles alternately; and bowed most obsequiously to the mayor and all public functionaries who passed within a reasonable and sometimes an unreasonable distance of him.

The time was approaching when he ought to have proclaimed the hour of eight in the morning to his employers; and he muttered something very irreverent against all bells in general, and the bell of the Town Hall of Buyemup in particular. Now, whether this bell, like many of its kind in earlier and more superstitious times, had been consecrated and dedicated to some calendared saint, and whether that canonized individual was indignant at the insult thus offered to his own consecrated piece of bellmetal, I cannot say. This is certain, that scarcely had the muttered naughty words with difficulty forced their way from the nearly-closed lips of Litigious Graspem, when he heard an awful

noise, like a miniature edition of an earthquake, and felt the ground tremble beneath his feet. He turned round to ascertain the cause of the shock, and there, partly to his joy and partly to his horror, he beheld the object of his impious hopes and curses lying on the ground at his feet.

He stood still and gazed upon the clapper for some time, and, as soon as the dust from the mortar and rotten boards which accompanied it in its descent had dispersed itself, could no longer doubt that it actually was the clapper which had given him so much trouble, mental and bodily. He thought a few moments with himself how he should act in the emergency; at length he seemed to have decided with himself what to do.

He walked twice up and down the marketplace, peeped out of every arch, down every street, and, seeing all clear, seized the clapper; and, weighty as it was, carried it at his usual majestic pace down to his own home underneath the skirts of his blue beadle's coat.

"Mrs. Graspem," said he to his spouse, as he entered and closed the door of his parlour," we