The String of Pearls (1850), p. 510

you, you ill-looking scarecrow! Easy does it. Will you walk? Oh, very well, don't. Who are you?"
A little man with a constable's staff in his hand, rushed before Ben, crying out—
"What is it? what is it? I'm a constable. What is it it?"
"Murder!" said Mrs. Oakley. "I give that man in charge for murdering his wife. I saw him do it."
"That will do," said the constable. "Give him to me. I'll take him. He dare not resist me. I'll have him."
Big Ben looked at the constable and then he shook his head, as he said very gravely—
"I tell you what it is, my little man, you ain't fit to tussle with such a fellow as this—I'll take him along for you. Where is he to go?"
"To the round-house, in course; but I'm a constable. I must take him—I will take him! Give him to me, sir, directly—I will have him—I
must go with him!"
"Wait a minute," said Ben. "Easy does it! You must go with him, you say? Very good—easy does everything!"
With this, Ben grasped Mr. Lupin round the middle, and placed him under his left arm, and suddenly pouncing, then, upon the constable, he caught him up and placed him under the right arm; and then away he walked, to the admiration of the populace, and paying about as much attention to the kicking of the constable and the kicking of Mr. Lupin, as though they were two dogs that he was carrying home.
And so the murderer was taken to the round-house, where Mrs. Oakley duly preferred the charge against him, and promised to substantiate it before a magistrate when called upon so to do.

CHAPTER CXVII.
SHOWS HOW MRS. OAKLEY RECONCILED HERSELF TO EVERYBODY AT HOME.

When Ben and Mrs. Oakley had thus disposed of Mr. Lupin, and left him to his solitary and not very pleasant reflections in a cell of the round-house, they found themselves together in the open street, and Ben, as he cast a woeful glance at her, said—
"Well, how does yer feel now? Easy does it! Oh, you aint a-been and behaved yourself properly lately— you is like the old bear as we calls Nosey. He's always a-doing what he shouldn't, and always a-never doing what he should."
"Ben?"
"Well, blaze away. What is yer going to say now?"
"I feel, Ben, that I am a very different woman from what I was—very different."
"Then you must have gained by the exchange, for you was, I will say it, anything but a pleasant bit o' goods. There's poor old Oakley a-making of spectacles all days, and a-wearing of his old eyes out—and there's Miss Johanna, bless her heart! as wise a little bit o' human nature as you'd wish to see, whether she's in petticoats or the other things; and yet you neglects 'em both, all for to run arter a canting snivelling wagabone like this Lupin, that we wouldn't have among the beasteses at the Tower, if so be he'd come and offer himself."
"I know it, Ben—I know it."
"You know it! Why didn't you know it before?"
"I don't know, Ben; but my eyes are open now. I have had a lesson that to my dying day I shall never forget. I have found that piety may only be a cloak with which to cover up the most monstrous iniquity."