e jockey with an arch
glance of his one brilliant eye.

"It was Isopel," said I; "did you know Isopel Berners?"

"Ay, and have reason to know her," said the jockey, putting his hand into
his left waistcoat pocket, as if to feel for something, "for she gave me
what I believe few men could do--a most confounded whopping. But now,
Mr. Romany Rye, I have again to tell you that I don't like to be
interrupted when I'm speaking, and to add that if you break in upon me a
third time, you and I shall quarrel."

"Pray proceed with your story," said I; "I will not interrupt you again."

"Good!" said the jockey. "Where was I? Oh, with a set of people who had
given up their minds to shortening! Reducing the coin, though rather a
lucrative, was a very dangerous trade. Coin filed felt rough to the
touch; coin clipped could be easily detected by the eye; and as for coin
reduced by aquafortis, it was generally so discoloured that, unless a
great deal of pains was used to polish it, people were apt to stare at it
in a strange manner, and to say, 'What have they been doing to this here
gold?' My grandfather, as I have said before, was connected with a gang
of shorters, and sometimes shortened money, and at other times passed off
what had been shortened by other gentry.

"Passing off what had been shortened by others was his ruin; for once, in
trying to pass off a broad piece which had been laid in aquafortis for
four-and-twenty hours, and was very black, not having been properly
rectified, he was stopped and searched, and other reduced coins being
found about him, and in his lodgings, he was committed to prison, tried,
and executed. He was offered his life, provided he would betray his
comrades; but he told the big-wigs, who wanted him to do so, that he
would see them farther first, and died at Tyburn, amidst the cheers of
the populace, leaving my grandmother and father, to whom he had always
been a kind husband and parent--for, setting aside the crime for which he
suffered, he was a moral man; leaving them, I say, to bewail his
irreparable loss.

"'Tis said that misfortune never comes alone; this is, however, not
always the case. Shortly after my grandfather's misfortune, as my
grandmother and her son were living in great misery in Spitalfields, her
only relation--a brother from whom she had been estranged some years, on
account of her marriage with my grandfather, who had been in an inferior
station to herself--died, leavin