At last, on Snipe's bespeaking, he went to Wimbledon,
which is a vastly smart suburb, and there, God knows, he fell into a
thousand absurd tricks so that many thought he was off his head.
He hired a singing man to stand before his door day and night
singing vulgar songs out of the street in praise of Dick Turpin and
Molly Nog, only forcing him to put in his name of Jack Bull in the
place of the Murderer or Oyster Wench therein celebrated.
He would drink rum with common soldiers in the public-houses and
then ask them in to dinner to meet gentlemen, saying "These are
heroes and gentlemen, which are the two first kinds of men," and
they would smoke great pipes of tobacco in his very dining-room to
the general disgust.
He would run out and cruelly beat small boys unaware, and when he
had nigh killed them he would come back and sit up half the night
writing an account of how he had fought Tom Mauler of Bermondsey and
beaten him in a hundred and two rounds, which (he would add) no man
living but he could do.
He would hang out of his window a great flag with a challenge on it
"to all the people of Wimbledon assembled, or to any of them
singly," and then he would be seen at his front gate waving a great
red flag and gnawing a bone like a dog, saying that he loved Force
only, and would fight all and any.
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