“Very soon Mr. and Mrs. Molinos Fitz-Roy began to disagree.  She was cold, correct—­he was hot and random.  He was quite dependent on her, and she made him feel it.  When he began to get into debt, he came to me.  At length some shocking quarrel occurred—­some case of jealousy on the wife’s side, not without reason, I believe; and the end of it was, Mr. Fitz-Roy was turned out of doors.  The house was his wife’s, the furniture was his wife’s, and the fortune was his wife’s—­he was, in fact, her pensioner.  He left with a few hundred pounds ready money, and some personal jewelry, and went to a hotel.  On these and credit he lived.  Being illegitimate, he had no relations—­being a fool, when he spent his money, he lost his friends.  The world took his wife’s part, when they found she had the fortune, and the only parties who interfered were her relatives, who did their best to make the quarrel incurable.  To crown all, one night he was run over by a cab, was carried to a hospital, and lay there for months, and was, during several weeks of the time, unconscious.  A message to the wife, by the hands of one of his debauched companions, sent by a humane surgeon, obtained an intimation that ’if he died, Mr. Croak, the undertaker to the family, had orders to see to the funeral,’ and that Mrs. Molinos was on the point of starting for the Continent, not to return for some years.  When Fitz-Roy was discharged, he came to me, limping on two sticks, to pawn his court-suit, and told me his story.  I was really sorry for the fellow—­such a handsome, thoroughbred-looking man.  He was going then into the west somewhere, to try to hunt out a friend.  ‘What to do, Balance,’ he said, ’I don’t know.  I can’t dig, and unless somebody will make me their gamekeeper, I must starve, or beg, as my Jezebel bade me, when we parted!’

“I lost sight of Molinos for a long time, and when I next came upon him it was in the Rookery of Westminster, in a low lodging-house, where I was searching with an officer for stolen goods.  He was pointed out to me as the ‘gentleman-cadger,’ because he was so free with his money when ’in luck.’  He recognized me, but turned away then.  I have since seen him, and relieved him more than once, although he never asks for anything.  How he lives, Heaven knows.  Without money, without friends, without useful education of any kind, he tramps the country, as you saw him, perhaps doing a little hop-picking or hay-making, in season, only happy when he obtains the means to get drunk.  I have heard through the kitchen whispers that you know come to me, that he is entitled to some property; and I expect if he were to die his wife would pay the hundred pound bill I hold; at any rate, what I have told you I know to be true, and the bundle of rags I relieved just now is known in every thieves’ lodging in England as the ‘gentleman cadger.’”

This story produced an impression on me:  I am fond of speculation, and like the excitement of a legal hunt as much as some do a fox-chase.  A gentleman, a beggar—­a wife rolling in wealth—­rumors of unknown property due to the husband;—­it seemed as if there were pickings for me amidst this carrion of pauperism.