CHAPTER TWELVE.
WHICH SHOWS THERE ARE MORE WAYS TO KILL A DOG THAN HANGING.
Mr.Fillet no sooner appeared in the judgment-chamber of Justice Gobble, than Captain Crowe, seizing him by the hand, exclaimed, "Body o' me! Doctor, thou'rt come up in the nick of time to lend us a hand in putting about .-- We're a little in the stays here--but howsomever we've got a good pilot, who knows the coast; and can weather the point, as the saying is.
As for the enemy's vessel, she has had a shot or two already athwart her forefoot; the next, I do suppose, will strike the hull, and then you will see her taken all a-back." The doctor, who perfectly understood his dialect, assured him he might depend upon his assistance; and, advancing to the knight, accosted him in these words: "Sir Launcelot Greaves, your most humble servant--when I saw a crowd at the door, I little thought of finding you within, treated with such indignity--yet I can't help being pleased with an opportunity of proving the esteem and veneration I have for your person and character .-- You will do me particular pleasure in commanding my best services." Our adventurer thanked him for this instance of his friendship, which he told him he would use without hesitation; and desired he would procure immediate bail for him and his two friends, who had been imprisoned contrary to law, without any cause assigned.
During this short dialogue, the justice, who had heard of Sir Launcelot's family and fortune, though an utter stranger to his person, was seized with such pangs of terror and compunction, as a grovelling mind may be supposed to have felt in such circumstances; and they seemed to produce the same unsavoury effects that are so humorously delineated by the inimitable Hogarth, in his print of Felix on his tribunal, done in the Dutch style.

Nevertheless, seeing Fillet retire to execute the knight's commands, he recollected himself so far as to tell the prisoners, there was no occasion to give themselves any farther trouble, for he would release them without bail or mainprise.

Then discarding all the insolence from his features, and assuming an aspect of the most humble adulation, he begged the knight ten thousand pardons for the freedoms he had taken, which were entirely owing to his ignorance of Sir Launcelot's quality.
"Yes, I'll assure you, sir," said the wife, "my husband would have bit off his tongue rather than say black is the white of your eye, if so be he had known your capacity .-- Thank God, we have been used to deal with gentlefolks, and many's the good pound we have lost by them; but what of that?
Sure we know how to behave to our betters.

Mr.Gobble, thanks be to God, can defy the whole world to prove that he ever said an uncivil word, or did a rude thing to a gentleman, knowing him to be a person of fortune.

Indeed, as to your poor gentry and riffraff, your tag-rag and bob-tail, or such vulgar scoundrelly people, he has always behaved like a magistrate, and treated them with the rigger of authority."-- "In other words," said the knight, "he has tyrannised over the poor, and connived at the vices of the rich.