you might see him walking arm-in-arm with such gentlemen as my Lord
Vauxhall, the Marquess of Billingsgate, or Captain Buff; and at the
same time nodding to young Moses, the dandy bailiff; or Loder, the
gambling-house keeper; or Aminadab, the cigar-seller in the
Quadrant. Sometimes he wore a pair of moustaches, and was called
Captain Walker; grounding his claim to that title upon the fact of
having once held a commission in the service of Her Majesty the
Queen of Portugal. It scarcely need be said that he had been
through the Insolvent Court many times. But to those who did not
know his history intimately there was some difficulty in identifying
him with the individual who had so taken the benefit of the law,
inasmuch as in his schedule his name appeared as Hooker Walker,
wine-merchant, commission-agent, music-seller, or what not. The
fact is, that though he preferred to call himself Howard, Hooker was
his Christian name, and it had been bestowed on him by his worthy
old father, who was a clergyman, and had intended his son for that
profession. But as the old gentleman died in York gaol, where he
was a prisoner for debt, he was never able to put his pious
intentions with regard to his son into execution; and the young
fellow (as he was wont with many oaths to assert) was thrown on his
own resources, and became a man of the world at a very early age.

What Mr. Howard Walker's age was at the time of the commencement of
this history, and, indeed, for an indefinite period before or
afterwards, it is impossible to determine. If he were
eight-and-twenty, as he asserted himself, Time had dealt hardly with
him: his hair was thin, there were many crows'-feet about his eyes,
and other signs in his countenance of the progress of decay. If, on
the contrary, he were forty, as Sam Snaffle declared, who himself
had misfortunes in early life, and vowed he knew Mr. Walker in