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Updated: May 26, 2025
"It has been hitherto rather the loss of others," I remarked, "which seems a little on the hither side of royalty." "Tilly-vally!" cried he. "Even now, I tell you, I would spare that family in which you take so great an interest: yes, even now to- morrow I would leave them to their petty welfare, and disappear in that forest of cut-throats and thimble-riggers that we call the world.
'There you are right; and, to show you that you are, I'll now trouble you for your fare. If you have been amongst the thimble-riggers you must be tolerably well cleared out. Where are you going? to ? I think I have seen you there. The fare is sixteen shillings. Come, tip us the blunt; them that has no money can't ride on my mail.
At the tables of the "money-changers," just outside of the sacred enclosure, are the real moneymakers, who give nothing for something. Thimble-riggers and three-card-monte-men do a brisk business and stand ready to fleece the guileless native or the unsuspecting foreigner. The operators may wear ragged ponchos and appear to be incapable of deep designs, but they know all the tricks of the trade!
Yet the crowd was denser now than during the morning hours, the frivolous contingent of visitors, including journeymen out for a holiday, a stray soldier or two come on furlough, village shopkeepers, and the like, having latterly flocked in; persons whose activities found a congenial field among the peep-shows, toy-stands, waxworks, inspired monsters, disinterested medical men who travelled for the public good, thimble-riggers, nick-nack vendors, and readers of Fate.
Over that green down which a hundred thousand feet had trodden brown, which a hundred thousand hands had strewn with bits of paper, cigar-ends, and the fragments of discarded food, over the great approaches to the battlefield, where all was pathway leading to and from the fight, those who make livelihood in such a fashion, least and littlest followers, were bawling, hawking, whining to the warriors flushed with victory or wearied by defeat: Over that green down, between one-legged men and ragged acrobats, women with babies at the breast, thimble-riggers, touts, walked George Pendyce, his mouth hard set and his head bent down.
Tom's evil genius did not lead him into the dens of any of those preparers of cannibalic pastry, who are represented in many standard country legends as doing a lively retail business in the Metropolis; nor did it mark him out as the prey of ring-droppers, pea and thimble-riggers, duffers, touters, or any of those bloodless sharpers, who are, perhaps, a little better known to the Police.
And here was gathered a motley crowd; bespangled tumblers and acrobats, dark-browed gipsy fortune-tellers and horse-coupers, thimble-riggers, showmen, itinerant musicians, all those nomads who are to be found on every race-course, fair, and village green, when the world goes a-holiday making.
"CHEE-CHEE," "be silent!" or "fie," is termed "Anglo-Indian," by the author of the Slang Dictionary, but we need not go to India of the present day for a term which is familiar to every Gipsy and "traveller" in England, and which, as Mr Simson discovered long ago, is an excellent "spell" to discourage the advances of thimble-riggers and similar gentry, at fairs, or in public places.
Ruggles, you and S. Behrman and Genslinger and Shelgrim and the whole gang of thieves of you you'll wake this State of California up some of these days by going just one little bit too far, and there'll be an election of Railroad Commissioners of, by, and for the people, that'll get a twist of you, my bunco-steering friend you and your backers and cappers and swindlers and thimble-riggers, and smash you, lock, stock, and barrel.
Thus defiled by fours, with the divers insignia of their grades, in that strange faculty, most of them lame, some cripples, others one-armed, shop clerks, pilgrim, hubins, bootblacks, thimble-riggers, street arabs, beggars, the blear-eyed beggars, thieves, the weakly, vagabonds, merchants, sham soldiers, goldsmiths, passed masters of pickpockets, isolated thieves.
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