memoranda of debts of honour, or pleasurable engagements. Now how worn,
tarnished, greasy, rascallion-like, the costly bauble! Filled with what
motley, unlovable contents: stale pawn-tickets of foreign /monts de
piete/, pledges never henceforth to be redeemed; scrawls by villanous
hands in thievish hierolgyphics; ugly implements replacing the malachite
penknife, the golden toothpick, the jewelled pencil-case, once so neatly
set within their satin lappets. Ugly implements, indeed,--a file, a
gimlet, loaded dice. Pell-mell, with such more hideous and recent
contents, dishonoured evidences of gaudier summer life,--locks of ladies'
hair, love-notes treasured mechanically, not from amorous sentiment, but
perhaps from some vague idea that they might be of use if those who gave
the locks or wrote the notes should be raised in fortune, and could buy
back the memorials of shame. Diving amidst these miscellaneous documents
and treasures, the prowler's hand rested on some old letters, in clerk-
like fair calligraphy, tied round with a dirty string, and on them, in
another and fresher writing, a scrap that contained an address,--"Samuel
Adolphus Poole, Esq., Alhambra Villa, Regent's Park." "To-morrow, Nix my
Dolly; to-morrow," muttered the tatterdemalion; "but to-night,--plague on
it, where is the other blackguard's direction? Ah, here!" And he
extracted from the thievish scrawls a peculiarly thievish-looking
hieroglyph. Now, as he lifts it up to read by the gaslight, survey him
well. Do you not know him? Is it possible? What! the brilliant
sharper! The ruffian exquisite! Jasper Losely! Can it be? Once
before, in the fields of Fawley, we beheld him out at elbows, seedy,
shabby, ragged. But then it was the decay of a foppish spendthrift,
--clothes distained, ill-assorted, yet, still of fine cloth; shoes in
holes, yet still pearl-coloured brodequins. But now it is the decay of
no foppish spendthrift: the rags are not of fine cloth; the tattered
shoes are not the brodequins. The man has fallen far below the politer
grades of knavery, in which the sharper affects the beau. And the