"The brutes!" said the lady; "and the father's a brute, too," said she.
"He takes no more notice of me than if I was a kitchen-maid, and of
Woolsey than if he was a leg of mutton--the dear blessed little cherub!"

Mrs. Crump was a mother-in-law; let us pardon her hatred of her
daughter's husband.

The Woolsey compared in the above sentence both to a leg of mutton and
a cherub, was not the eminent member of the firm of Linsey, Woolsey, and
Co., but the little baby, who was christened Howard Woolsey Walker, with
the full consent of the father; who said the tailor was a deuced good
fellow, and felt really obliged to him for the sherry, for a frock-coat
which he let him have in prison, and for his kindness to Morgiana. The
tailor loved the little boy with all his soul; he attended his mother
to her churching, and the child to the font; and, as a present to his
little godson on his christening, he sent two yards of the finest white
kerseymere in his shop, to make him a cloak. The Duke had had a pair of
inexpressibles off that very piece.

House-furniture is bought and sold, music-lessons are given, children
are born and christened, ladies are confined and churched--time, in
other words, passes--and yet Captain Walker still remains in prison!
Does it not seem strange that he should still languish there between
palisaded walls near Fleet Market, and that he should not be restored to
that active and fashionable world of which he was an ornament? The fact
is, the Captain had been before the court for the examination of his
debts; and the Commissioner, with a cruelty quite shameful towards
a fallen man, had qualified his ways of getting money in most severe
language, and had sent him back to prison again for the space of nine
calendar months, an indefinite period, and until his accounts could
be made up. This delay Walker bore like a philosopher, and, far from
repining, was still the gayest fellow of the tennis-court, and the soul
of the midnight carouse.

There is no use in raking up old stories, and hunting through files
of dead newspapers, to know what were the specific acts which made the
Commissioner so angry with Captain Walker. Many a rogue has come before
the Court, and passed through it since then: and I would lay a wager
that Howard Walker was not a bit worse than his neighbours. But as he
was not a lord, and as he had no friends on coming out of prison, and
had settled no money on his wife, and had, as it must b