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Sir George, in old days, had instructed some of the female members of our family, and I recollect cutting my fingers as a child with one of those attenuated green-handled knives in the queer box yonder. In those days Sir George Thrum was the first great musical teacher of London, and the royal patronage brought him a great number of fashionable pupils, of whom Lady Fitz-Boodle was one.
Dick Martingall's and Tom Painter's dresses were not much less out of order, giving them more the appearance of gentlemen of the highway than of naval officers of respectability. One had a large brass sword, once belonging to his great-grandfather, a trooper in the army of the Prince of Orange, the other a green-handled hanger, which had done service with Sir Cloudsley Shovel."
It was not at all the sort of table we see now, but would look very plain and countrified to us, with its green-handled knives and two-pronged steel forks; its red-and-white china, and pewter platters, scoured till they shone, with mugs and spoons to match, and a brown jug for the cider.
He took a slight draught of the offending ale, and was critically surveying the loaf, before applying to it that green-handled knife of his, whose elegance you have heard of, when a second summons was heard at the door a very timid one this time. Mr. Ketch flung down the bread and the knife. "What's the reason I can't get a meal in quiet? Who is it?"
The table was already spread for dinner; and though it was spread with nothing very choice in the way of glass or linen, and with green-handled knives, and very mountebanks of two-pronged forks, which seemed to be trying how far asunder they could possibly stretch their legs without converting themselves into double the number of iron toothpicks, it wanted neither damask, silver, gold, nor china; no, nor any other garniture at all.
One was a tall man mounted on a white horse, and leading a riderless black horse. His hat was pulled down about his head so that his face could not be clearly seen. Now the companion that was with him had the appearance of a bare-headed youngster, with dark red hair, and his face too was hidden as he sat by the roadway trimming his long finger-nails with a small green-handled knife.
He searched on this side, he searched on that; he pulled out the contents, one by one: a black-handled knife, a white-handled fork, a green-handled knife with a broken point, and a brown-handled fork with one prong, which comprised his household cutlery; a small whetstone, a comb and a blacking-brush, a gimlet and a small hammer, some leather shoe-strings, three or four tallow candles, a match-box and an extinguisher, the key of his door, the bolt of his casement window, and a few other miscellanies.
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