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I hope it will come soon, or the old girl at the inn here will think we're cadgers. We had a stunning row on the lake yesterday; the boats are only a bob an hour, so we thought we might go in for it. Of course it didn't matter, as we could swim; but the fellows in the steamer kicked up an awful shine about it, and came and hauled us up, boat and all.
Like all childless Romans of independent means she was the object of unblushing and overwhelming attentions from countless legacy cadgers. She enjoyed the game, accepted everything offered in the way of gifts, services or invitations, and, moreover, played up to it, for she was forever destroying her last will and making a new one.
The former are generally too fast and the latter too slow. Besides which, your efforts to get a glimpse of the public house clock from the outside are attended with great difficulties. If you gently push the swing-door ajar and peer in you draw upon yourself the contemptuous looks of the barmaid, who at once puts you down in the same category with area sneaks and cadgers.
Christopher Sly, from the ale-house door, if caught while the Merry Duke had possession of him, must be chronicled for a peer of the realm; Bully Bottom, if the period of his translations fell in with the census-taking, must be numbered among the cadgers' "mokes"; nay, if Dogberry himself had encountered the officials at the moment of his pathetic lamentation, he were irrevocably written down "an ass."
Lastly, in the group of first-night deadheads come the members of the unrecognised, ill-organised, generally tactless claque. The species that lately has been attacked is divisible into two groups. The first consists of the people who will not go to the theatre without an order, but do not expect first-night tickets one may call them the "cadgers."
When the young men, who looked for him to say otherwhat, heard this, they all made mock of him and said, 'Thou gullest us, as if we knew not the Cadgers, even as thou dost. 'By the Evangels, replied Scalza, 'I gull you not; nay, I speak the truth, and if there be any here who will lay a supper thereon, to be given to the winner and half a dozen companions of his choosing, I will willingly hold the wager; and I will do yet more for you, for I will abide by the judgment of whomsoever you will. Quoth one of them, called Neri Mannini, 'I am ready to try to win the supper in question'; whereupon, having agreed together to take Piero di Fiorentino, in whose house they were, to judge, they betook themselves to him, followed by all the rest, who looked to see Scalza lose and to make merry over his discomfiture, and recounted to him all that had passed.
The best gentlemen and the oldest, not only of Florence, but of all the world or the Maremma, are the Cadgers, a matter upon which all the phisopholers and every one who knoweth them, as I do, are of accord; and lest you should understand it of others, I speak of the Cadgers your neighbors of Santa Maria Maggiore.
But I asked him, as I got into my car, to what country he thought we both belonged. "Vy! I'm from Glasgow!" he said, much offended. "Scotland forever!" So far as I know the young man had no ulterior motive in claiming to be a fellow Scot. But to do that has aye been a favorite trick of cadgers and beggars. I mind weel a time when I was leaving a hall, and a rare looking bird collared me.
You must know, then, that the Cadgers were made by God the Lord in the days when He first began to learn to draw; but the rest of mankind were made after He knew how to draw.
The next day, his first care was to distribute fifty pounds among his friends, the cadgers, at a "house of call" in Westminster, and formally to dissolve his connection with them; those present undertaking for the "fraternity," that for the future he should never be noticed by them in public or private. I cannot follow his career much further. Adversity had taught him nothing.
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