amusement, the
characters of the various prisoners with whom he had associated--from
the sneaking pick-pocket and the murderous ruffian, to the simple
Highland smuggler, who had converted his grain into whisky, with scarce
intelligence enough to see that there was aught morally wrong in the
transaction--he sought only to be as graphic and humorous as he could,
and always with complete success. But there attached to his narratives
an unintentional moral; and I cannot yet call them up without feeling
indignant at that detestable practice of promiscuous imprisonment which
so long obtained in our country, and which had the effect of converting
its jails into such complete criminal-manufacturing institutions, that,
had the honest men of the community risen and dealt by them as the
Lord-George-Gordon mob dealt with Newgate, I hardly think they would
have been acting out of character. Poor Charles had a nobility in his
nature which saved him from being contaminated by what was worst in his
meaner associates; but he was none the better for his imprisonment, and
he quitted jail, of course, a marked man; and his after career was, I
fear, all the more reckless in consequence of the stain imparted at this
time to his character. He was as decidedly a leader among his brother
workmen as I myself had been, when sowing my wild oats, among my
schoolfellows; but society in its settled state, and in a country such
as ours, allows no such scope to the man as it does to the boy; and so
his leadership, dangerous both to himself and his associates, had
chiefly as the scene of its trophies the grosser and more lawless haunts
of vice and dissipation. His course through life was a sad, and, I fear,
a brief one. When that sudden crash in the commercial world took place,
in which the speculation mania of 1824-25 terminated, he was, with
thousands more, thrown out of employment; and, having saved not a
farthing of his earnings, he was compelled, under the pressure of actual
want, to enlist as a soldier into one of the regiments of the line,
bound for one of the intertropical colonies. And there, as his old
comrades lost all trace of him, he too probably fell a victim, in an
insalubrious climate, to old habits and new rum.

Finding me incorrigible, I was at length left by my brother operatives
to be as peculiar as I pleased; and the working portion of the autumnal
months passed off pleasantly enough in hewing great stones under the
branching foliage