The String of Pearls (1850), p. 658

"It's my opinion," he said, "that Todd—as he had other folks made up into pies—ought te be made into one himself, and then given to mad dogs for a supper—Ha! ha! That's a very good thought of mine, and when I go to the 'Pig's-eye, Tooth, and Tinder-box,' I will out with it, and the will knock their pots and glasses against the table beautifully, and cry out—'Well done, bravo!—bravo!' I rather think I'm a great man at the 'Pig's-eye, Tooth and Tinder-box.'"
By this tims the beadle had got quite to the top of the pulpit stairs, and had his hand on the door. Todd was crouched down at the bottom of the pulpit, waiting for him like some famished tiger ready to pounce upon his prey. He fully intended to murder the unfortunate beadle.
"Well, here goes," said that most unhappily-situated functionary, as he stepped into the pulpit.
Todd immediately grasped his legs.
"If you say one word, you are a dead man!"
The shock was too much for the nerves of the poor beadle of St. Dunstan's, and on the instant he fainted, and fell huddled up at the bottom of the little place.
Todd immediately stood upon the prostrate form of the parochial authority. "Ha! ha!" he laughed, "I have him now, and I shall be able to leave St. Dunstan's yet."
He trampled as hard upon the beadle as he could, and then he took the clasp knife from his pocket, and said—
"It will be better to kill him. Rise, idiot, rise, and tell me if you can, why I should not cut your throat?"
The beadle neither moved nor spoke.
"Is he dead?" said Todd, "Has the fright killed him? It is strange; but I have heard of such things. Why it surely must be so. The sudden shock has been the death of him, and it would be a waste of time for me to touch him. He is dead—he must be dead!"
Todd, full of this feeling, retreated two or three steps down the little winding staircase of the pulpit, and then reaching in his hand, he caught hold of the poor beadle by the hair of his head, and dragged him sufficiently out of the pulpit to be enabled to look him in the face. The eyes were closed, the inspiration seemed to be stopped, and there was, in truth, every appearance of death about the unfortunte functionary of the old church.
"Yes, dead," said Todd; "but it will be better for me. He will be found here, and as no violence will show upon him, the doctors will learnedly pronounce it a case of apoplexy, and there will arise no suspicion of my having been here at all. It is much better, oh, much, than as if I had killed him."
With this feeling, Todd pushed what he considered to be the dead body of the beadle back into the pulpit again, and then himself rapidly descended the little
spiral flight of stairs.
The clock of St. Dunstan's struck the hour of ten, and Todd carefully counted the strokes.
"Ten," he said. "A busy hour—a hour of broad daylight, and I with such a price upon my head, and the hands of all men lifted against me, in one of the most populous streets in the City of London! It is a fearful risk!"
It was a fearful risk, and Todd might well shudder to find that his temerity had brought him into such a position; but yet he felt that if anything were to save him, it would be boldness, and not shrinking timidity. One great cause of dread had passed away from Todd when Sir Richard Blunt left the church. If in anyway Todd had had to encounter him, he would have shrunk back appalled at the frightful risk.
When he gained the body of the church, he glanced again up to the pulpit, but all was there profoundly still; and the fact of the death of the beadle appeared to him, Todd, to be so very firmly established, now, as to require no further confirmation.