There are many who delight to visit the police-offices
for the sake of seeing those beings who appear there, of whom others
only read: some of our readers may, perhaps, be bitten with a similar
fancy; but, we warrant, that they will find the actual doings at
Bow-street very different to what they had imagined; as Charles Mathews'
_Sir Harry Skelton_ says, "There's nothing at all in it; people talk a
great deal about it--but there's nothing in it, after all--nothing."
It is not often that we look in at morning or evening sitting of the
magistrates; we are content to have the police reports served up to us
with our potted beef and buttered toast at breakfast; we enjoy them,
although we feel convinced that many of them bear no more resemblance to
the affairs they are founded on, than mock-turtle to calf's-head; still,
like the soup, they are by far the most pleasant and palatable of the
two.--_Every Night Book_.
* * * * *
THE CURRAL.
The view in front was obstructed by a high ridge, of which we had nearly
gained the highest point, when we left our horses, and running up a few
yards of steep turf found ourselves all at once on the brink of the
Curral. It is a huge valley, or rather crater, of immense depth,
enclosed on all sides by a range of magnificent mountain precipices, the
sides and summit of which are broken in every variety of buttress or
pinnacle--now black and craggy and beetling--at other times spread with
the richest green turf, and scattered with a profusion of the evergreen
forest-trees, indigenous to the island; while far below, in the midst of
all these horrors, smiles a fairy region of cultivation and
fruitfulness, with a church and village, the white cabins of which seem
half smothered in the luxuriance of their own vines and orchards.
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