on't see where they hit," said S----th drawlingly.
"Somewhere about the pineal; and therefore we say impudence is moral,
sometimes immoral, as just now when you damned me. No more of your old
junk, I say, sitting here in my cathedra, which by the way is
spring-bottomed, which may account for my moral elasticity that a
highwayman is a coward."

"Well," cried S----k, starting up. "I'll deposit a pound with W----pe,
on a bet that you'll not take sixpence from the first bumpkin we meet on
the road, by the old watchword, 'Stand and deliver;' and you'll have the
gun to boot."

"Ay, that's a physical bribe," cried W----pe; and, after pausing a
little, "The fellow flinches."

"And surely the reverse must hold," added S----k, "that, being a coward,
he must be a highwayman."

"Why, you see, gents," said S----th coolly, "I don't mind a very great
deal, you know, though I do take said sixpence from said bumpkin; but I
won't do it, you know, on compulsion."

"If there's no compulsion, there's no robbery," said S----k.

"Oh, I mean _your_ compulsion. As for mine, exercised on said bumpkin,
let me alone for that part of the small affair; but none of your
compulsion, if you love me. I can do anything, but not upon compulsion,
you know."

"Done then!"

"Why, ye-e-s," drawled S----th, "done; I may say, gents, done; but I say
with Sir John, don't misunderstand me, not upon compulsion, you know."

"Your own free will," shouted both the others, now pretty well to do in
the world of dithyrambics. "Here's your instrument for extorting the
sixpence by force or fear."

And this young man, half inebriated--with, we may here say
parenthetically, a mother living in a garret in James' Square, with one
son and an only daughter of a respectable though poor man, and who
trusted to her son for being the means of her support--qualified, as we
have seen, by high parts to extort from society respect, and we may add,
though that has not appeared, to conciliate love and admiration--took
willingly into his hand the old rusty "Innes," to perpetrate upon the
highway a robbery. And would he do it? You had only to look upon his
face for an instant to be certain that he would; for he had all the
lineaments of a young man of indomitable courage and resolution--the
steady eye, the firm lip, all under the high brows of intellect, nor
unmixed with the beauty that belongs to these moral expressions which in
the playfulness of the social hour he had been r