Their other aunt alsovisited them frequently, and always, as she said, with the design ofcheering and heartening them up--though, as she never came withoutreporting some fresh instance of Wickham's extravagance or irregularity,she seldom went away without leaving them more dispirited than she foundthem.
Even this resource shortly failed him;his irregularities were too great to admit of his earning the wretchedpittance he might thus have procured, and he was actually reduced to astate bordering on starvation, only procuring a trifle occasionally byborrowing it of some old companion, or by obtaining an appearance at oneor other of the commonest of the minor theatres; and when he did earnanything it was spent in the old way.
The stone was uneven and broken, and the letters werestraggling and irregular, but the following fragment of an inscriptionwas clearly to be deciphered:-- [cross] B I L S T u m P S H I S.
Now, if the unfortunate Mr. Phunky had sat down when Serjeant Snubbinhad winked at him, or if Serjeant Buzfuz had stopped this irregularcross-examination at the outset (which he knew better than to do;observing Mr. Winkle's anxiety, and well knowing it would, in allprobability, lead to something serviceable to him), this unfortunateadmission would not have been elicited.
( Dickens The Pickwick papers ) 'Certain sure,' replied Pell; 'but if he'd gone to any irregularpractitioner, mind you, I wouldn't have answered for the consequences.
Herehe stopped for a minute, to look at the strange, irregular clusters oflights piled one above the other, and twinkling afar off so high, thatthey looked like stars, gleaming from the castle walls on the one sideand the Calton Hill on the other, as if they illuminated veritablecastles in the air; while the old picturesque town slept heavily on, ingloom and darkness below: its palace and chapel of Holyrood, guarded dayand night, as a friend of my uncle's used to say, by old Arthur's Seat,towering, surly and dark, like some gruff genius, over the ancient cityhe has watched so long.
( Dickens The Pickwick papers ) '"Well," said my uncle, as he looked about him, "a mail travelling atthe rate of six miles and a half an hour, and stopping for an indefinitetime at such a hole as this, is rather an irregular sort of proceeding,I fancy.
Of course, he may be innocent; but he didenter the garden in an irregular fashion.