’Or translating; I don’t think the Armenian would have paid me at that rate for translating his Esop.’

‘Who is he?’ said the man.

‘Esop?’

‘No, I know what that is, Esop’s cant for a hunchback; but t’other?’

‘You should know,’ said I.

‘Never saw the man in all my life.’

‘Yes, you have,’ said I, ’and felt him too; don’t you remember the individual from whom you took the pocket-book?’

’Oh, that was he; well, the less said about that matter the better; I have left off that trade, and taken to this, which is a much better.  Between ourselves, I am not sorry that I did not carry off that pocket-book; if I had, it might have encouraged me in the trade, in which had I remained, I might have been lagged, sent abroad, as I had been already imprisoned; so I determined to leave it off at all hazards, though I was hard up, not having a penny in the world.’

‘And wisely resolved,’ said I; ’it was a bad and dangerous trade, I wonder you should ever have embraced it.’

‘It is all very well talking,’ said the man, ’but there is a reason for everything; I am the son of a Jewess, by a military officer’—­and then the man told me his story.  I shall not repeat the man’s story, it was a poor one, a vile one; at last he observed, ’So that affair which you know of determined me to leave the filching trade, and take up with a more honest and safe one; so at last I thought of the pea and thimble, but I wanted funds, especially to pay for lessons at the hands of a master, for I knew little about it.’

‘Well,’ said I, ‘how did you get over that difficulty?’

‘Why,’ said the man, ’I thought I should never have got over it.  What funds could I raise?  I had nothing to sell; the few clothes I had I wanted, for we of the thimble must always appear decent, or nobody would come near us.  I was at my wits’ ends; at last I got over my difficulty in the strangest way in the world.’

‘What was that?’

‘By an old thing which I had picked up some time before—­a book.’

‘A book?’ said I.

’Yes, which I had taken out of your lordship’s pocket one day as you were walking the streets in a great hurry.  I thought it was a pocket-book at first, full of bank-notes, perhaps,’ continued he, laughing.  ’It was well for me, however, that it was not, for I should have soon spent the notes; as it was, I had flung the old thing down with an oath, as soon as I brought it home.  When I was so hard up, however, after the affair with that friend of yours, I took it up one day, and thought I might make something by it to support myself a day with.  Chance or something else led me into a grand shop; there was a man there who seemed to be the master, talking to a jolly, portly old gentleman, who seemed to be a country squire.  Well, I went up to the first, and offered it for sale; he took the book, opened it at the title-page, and then all