miserable sinner! And thou art going now, Nicholas Grabman, upon an
enterprise which promises thee large gains, and thy purse is filled; and
thou wantest nothing for thy wants or thy swinish luxuries. Why should
those shaking fingers itch for the poor beggar-man's hoards?

But hadst thou been bound on an errand that would have given thee a
million, thou wouldst not have left unrifled that secret store which thy
prying eye had discovered, and thy hungry heart had coveted. No; since
one night,--fatal, alas! to the owner of loft and treasure, when, needing
Beck for some service, and fearing to call aloud (for the resurrection-
man in the floor below thee, whose oaths even now ascend to thine ear,
sleeps ill, and has threatened to make thee mute forever if thou
disturbest him in the few nights in which his dismal calling suffers him
to sleep at all), thou didst creep up the ladder, and didst see the
unconscious miser at his nightly work, and after the sight didst steal
down again, smiling,--no; since that night, no schoolboy ever more
rootedly and ruthlessly set his mind upon nest of linnet than thine was
set upon the stores in Beck's mattress.

And yet why, O lawyer, should rigid moralists blame thee more than such
of thy tribe as live, honoured and respectable, upon the frail and the
poor? Who among them ever left loft or mattress while a rap could be
wrung from either? Matters it to Astraea whether the spoliation be made
thus nakedly and briefly, or by all the acknowledged forms in which, item
on item, six-and-eightpence on six-and-eightpence, the inexorable hand
closes at length on the last farthing of duped despair? Not--Heaven
forbid!--that we make thee, foul Nicholas Grabman, a type for all the
class called attorneys-at-law! Noble hearts, liberal minds, are there
amongst that brotherhood, we know and have experienced; but a type art
thou of those whom want and error and need have proved--alas! too well--