CHAP. XV. Tom is bound apprentice to a dancing master. His great progress in that genteel Science: His adventures with the Monkeys.

Dolly his new mistress, had lately applied to a register office, where for a shilling paid in hand, a small capital, it is possible to procure the interest of four or five pounds a year. A most wise institution, or rather discovery of some sagacious æconomical personage, who might have made an immense fortune by his invention, had not his envious brethren pyrated him to the great disgrace of government, and discouragement of genius, as well as arts and sciences: Pity it is, that this prudent politician, had not been at the expence of purchasing a patent, to ensure to himself the profits of so great a discovery.

One of these learned Gentlemen, had obtained a place for Dolly, who paid the other perquisites, due on being put into possession; I think it is a shilling in the pound, proportionable to the wages; so that if the wages be five pounds, the proprietor of this new acquisition, whether place-man, or place-woman, shall receive no more than nineteen shillings of his, or her quarter’s wages; so that if one of these place-mongers shall procure one hundred such places, in one quarter, (which is but a low computation) he shall receive the gratuity of thirty pounds for his pains, without advancing a farthing capital; how high must then this reasonable profit arise, when the wages or sallaries amount to ten or twenty pounds a year? and yet this lucrative employment is of modern discovery, to the great scandal of our forefathers, who as in the discovery of other arts, and sciences, supinely slept, and never dreamed of such golden advantages. Dolly on going to her new place, was sorely perplexed, what to do with her favourite Tom; next to money or man’s flesh, she loved Tom, and as the former seemed the more feasible exchange, she pitched upon it as the more eligible; among her Jew acquaintance, during her residence with the circumcised cast off clothes-man, she had recollected her intimate connections, with a young German of the synagogue, on whom she bestowed some singular marks of her affection: He had for several seasons frequented Bartholomew fair, and the Borough, and was proprietor of several foreign beasts, as monkies, man-tygers, and others of the minute kind, whom he trained up to his own band, beneath the discipline of the whip and bell, and taught them a thousand feats of activity, and cunning, by means of the very same doctrine which Richlieu, the French general, devised to conquer the stubborn English at the intended invasion, and conquest of England, viz. Fear and Hunger, but which he admirably improved into the sanguinary tenets of downright murder in cold blood, a tenet, worthy the general of a most Christian King.

To this German, of the Hebrew race, she instantly applied and sold poor Tom, under the foster name of apprenticeship to this tyrant king of the Singeric order; if the Scots sold their king for a groat, and Judas his master for thirty silver pennys, how more barbarous in her to sell her favourite, and fellow-servant for an old cast cardinal, to adorn her for her introduction to her new place; but so she did, and poor Tom’s indentures were made over a pot of porter, to the disgrace of humanity, much more of female tenderness, in this black deed exceeding the cruelty of Ynkle, who sold his mistress Yarico for an inconsiderable sum. How could she wear this black robe, which every day threw in her face the blackness of her guilt and ingratitude; if she could not recollect the many gambols of his infancy, and the sweeter endearments of his more advanced and adult age, if she could forget the many songs with which he entertained her, both at meals, at work, and in bed, where he often purred her to sleep; sure she ought to think of her fellow-sufferer, and fellow-servant with more compassion than to deliver him into the hands of a savage, among savages, under whose intolerable cruelty he must endure many and severe stripes, beside the accumulated hardships of confinement, and starving.—Unhappy Tom! better had it been for thee, ere thy eyes were opened, to have shared the fate of thy brethren and sisters, long since past the sense and feeling of their sufferings.

But we will not dwell longer on so mournful a subject, an event, in itself, of so tragic a nature, as may extort tears from many of our compassionate readers.

The first letter of salutation Tom was taught by his dancing master, was to leap thro’ a hoop, but as he was some months before learnt to leap over the stick by his young school-fellows, he easily went thro’ this exercitation to the no small surprize of his master, who yet imputed this first step to Tom’s natural genius; and therefore promised himself all success imaginable from so sensible, and so active a creature. Though Tom had in his younger days often described the diagonal parallelogram circle in pursuit of his own tail, round which he had performed as many revolutions in a day, as the Earth does round the Sun in a century, yet had he never till now made an horizontal line through the center of a circle. He was next tried in the begging attitude, but in this too he excelled all the quadrupeds that ever came within the jurisdiction of this German posture master, so that in his second lesson, he surprized his master as agreeably as before, and actually followed a piece of meat, which was conducted before him, by way of precedent, more erect than many of his bipedal fellow-creatures of the more dignified species; his next instruction was to perform the gradation of a perpendicular ladder of ropes; in this he was somewhat awkward, but by degrees, and as it were by gradation, he acquitted himself tollerably well for the first time, and was esteemed as an excellent scholar, and his master boasted of his new pupil’s proficiency with more than ordinary elevation of voice and spirit. By de lord, dat made me, says the German, dancing-master, me hav one kot, dat vil bring me more monis, in one, two, three monts, dan all my monkies togeder, me wou’d not give him for one guinea, at dis present time, and fen he is made to my hond, me wou’d no give him for ten. Thus the first day passed to the great credit, and entire satisfaction of his master, who threw aside the whip and bell, believing from such a great docility that he should never more have occasion for it with respect to Tom, who was notwithstanding tied up to his respective post, with a good strong whip-cord. But as Dalilah bound Sampson with cords, sufficient as she thought to bind him down to his good behaviour, which he broke as a man would flaxed threads, so in vain did the German posture-master tie up Tom who made a shift to knaw the bands asunder, and give himself liberty; but alas! the door was shut, and he found himself to his great mortification, as close a prisoner as ever; so casting about to find a vent-hole for his escape, he searched to no purpose, and seeing a strange groupe of unnatural figures about him, his curiosity led him to approach them, which he did to their no small surprize and terror, and as they spoke to him in an unknown languague, so he found that conversation, which he desired with his fellow-prisoners, cut off; he first came in a gentle manner, and saluted the old baboon with a loud mew, and was answered with a loud chatter, which at first disconcerted him very much, not well knowing whether the noise he made was a signal of friendship, or antipathy; however, as he judged his fellow-prisoner’s heart by his own integrity, he proceeded, and extended his paw, as it were to play with the old gentleman, which the other bit almost to the bone, and had very nigh disabled poor Tom from ever practising another lesson, this rough return to his good-nature so irritated Tom the Cat, that he fell upon Pug the Monkey’s leathern jaws which he tore in a terrible manner, and then went round with the whole neighbourhood, not daunted even at the man-tyger’s dreadful form, for Tom had such intrepid courage that he would venture upon the Devil himself in his anger, had he been in the shape of any of those creatures, though it were an armed rhinoceros, or the Hyrcanian tyger.

The out cry that was set up in the prison, brought the keeper, who judged that some of them had broke loose and fallen upon the rest, but least of all did he judge his favourite Tom’s having slipt his collar, but easily guessed how matters went, when he saw the old baboon, the man-tyger, and the other lesser creatures bleeding. He considered what part he should take, or what measures pursue, in so interesting an affair. He rightly believed that Tom must have been the aggressor, as it was consistent to reason so to imagine. He had got a great deal of money, by his old acquaintance the singerical fraternity, and never had handled a penny piece of Tom’s gettings, but then he might possibly get a fortune by so extraordinary and so promissing a genius, beside, thought he, the poor fellow, not dreaming any harm might have come too near them, and so have received the first blow, which he owned was provoking to one of Tom’s spirit, but when he saw the creature limping up to him, and his fine coat tore in several places he was confirmed in his opinion, that the battle sprung from the malevolent monkeys, whom yet he thought it hard to chastise as they had suffered sufficiently from the enraged fury of our feline hero. He however took up the whip, and bell and brandished over the heads of the terrified society, taking Tom along with him, as one unfit for such quarrelsome companions, and worthy of a superior destination; he therefore took him up to his own room, and having clasp’d a leather collar round his neck to which he affixed a neat brass chain, he pinned it down to the floor, permitting him a good scope to walk about the room, after this he combed him and examining his legs, he applyed a little butter to it, which Tom by constantly licking, as it was kept constantly greased, soon made a cure of. When he was perfectly recovered the German took abundance of pains in his education, teaching him to walk fast, to run, and to jump on his hind feet, so that Tom at the age of five months, became a perfect adept, and could cut capers higher than mons. —— the French dancer. He in three days made him tumble head over heels, backwards and forwards, and even three Somersets at once. Had he possessed the hands of tenacity like those of the monkey, Tom would have excelled all of that species, taught or untaught. This was a great deficience in Tom’s make and form, and as sensible a grief to his master, who would have given ten guineas that Tom had pugs hands, but as the poet says, non omnia possumus omnes, nec licet cuivis adire corinthum, and with this scrap of Latin we shall abrutly conclude this chapter, in order to have an opportunity of displaying our learning, and to begin another chapter.