A day or two after the narrative of Mr. Tomlinson, Paul was again visited
by Mrs. Lobkins,--for the regulations against frequent visitors were not
then so strictly enforced as we understand them to be now; and the good
dame came to deplore the ill-success of her interview with Justice
Burnflat.

We spare the tender-hearted reader a detail of the affecting interview
that ensued. Indeed, it was but a repetition of the one we have before
narrated. We shall only say, as a proof of Paul's tenderness of heart,
that when he took leave of the good matron, and bade "God bless her," his
voice faltered, and the tears stood in his eyes,--just as they were wont
to do in the eyes of George the Third, when that excellent monarch was
pleased graciously to encore "God save the King!"

"I'll be hanged," soliloquized our hero, as he slowly bent his course
towards the subtle Augustus,--"I'll be hanged (humph! the denunciation is
prophetic), if I don't feel as grateful to the old lady for her care of
me as if she had never ill-used me. As for my parents, I believe I have
little to be grateful for or proud of in that quarter. My poor mother,
by all accounts, seems scarcely to have had even the brute virtue of
maternal tenderness; and in all human likelihood I shall never know
whether I had one father or fifty. But what matters it? I rather like
the better to be independent; and, after all, what do nine tenths of us
ever get from our parents but an ugly name, and advice which, if we
follow, we are wretched, and if we neglect, we are disinherited?"

Comforting himself with these thoughts, which perhaps took their
philosophical complexion from the conversations he had lately held with
Augustus, and which broke off into the muttered air of--