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What was more, on that very night he had first made Greenacre's acquaintance at a bar; they swore eternal brotherhood, and Greenacre borrowed half a sovereign, never repaid. With Gammon's help the cabman found his way to the Bilboes. "Don't get out," he said to his companion. "I'll ask if he has come."
A very doubtful form of diversion was furnished to New Englanders at the public expense and in the performance of public duties. Not only were offenders whipped, set in the stocks, bilboes, cage, or pillory on Lecture-day, but criminals were hung with much parade before the eyes of the people, as a visible token of the punishment of evil living.
The few men who were about had a prosperous appearance, and Gammon saw that they did not belong to his special world. "What does the name mean?" he inquired, as they seated themselves under a gas-jet in a corner made cosy with a deep divan. "Bilboes? Oh, I originated it in the days gone by. The proprietor was a man called William Bowes you perceive? Poor little Jimmy Todd used to roar about it.
The character of the mob, if it could be called by such a name, was that of attentive subordination. The constable was in the act of lowering the upper plank, when Benjamin, who had pressed close to the side of the prisoner, said, in his hoarse tone, as if seeking for some cause to create a quarrel: Where away, master constable, is the use of clapping a man in them here bilboes?
Next day they asked the Governor's sanction to this proposal, and were so far rewarded that in less than another twenty-four hours a messenger had been dispatched to Wilmington and Charles Town bearing letters under the colony seal. The Royal James hurried down the Chesapeake for a day and a night before Captain Bonnet gave orders to free the young prisoners below in the bilboes.
"You're the most incomprehensible fellow, Bev," said the Viscount, seating himself on the edge of the table and swinging his leg. "You have been a constant surprise to me ever since you found me er let us say ruminating in the bilboes, and now" here he shook his head gravely "and now it seems you are to become a source of infernal worry and anxiety as well." "I hope not, Dick."
Secretary at the Cockpit, and tells him plainly that such an indignity towards his Majesty's prisoners in the Tower was never heard of, that no such base modes of coercion as chains or bilboes had ever been known in use since the reign of King Charles I., and that the King's warders were there to see that the prisoners did not attempt Evasion. To which Mr.
Ja'afar answered, "O Commander of the Faithful, do thou imprison him; whoso built the first jail was a sage, seeing that a jail is the grave of the living and a joy for the foe." So the Caliph bade lay him in bilboes and write thereon, "Appointed to remain here until death and not to be loosed but on the corpse washer's bench;" and they cast him fettered into limbo.
I, being a plain, blunt man, shall simply say for myself that for many days after being taken from the bilboes and made free of the deck, I was grievously distempered by reason of the waves, and so collapsed in the bowels that I could neither eat, stand, nor lie.
"Better to do that," quoth Toobey, calming down into mere give and take for he had, in truth, done some droll things in mummy medicaments, "than to have been a Fleet parson, that was forced to sell ale and couple beggars for a living, and turned doctor when he had cured a bad leg for one that had lain too long in the bilboes."
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