d companions; nor sleep sound, unless we drink longer than we
can stand. If we go abroad in the day, a wise man would easily find us
to be rogues by our faces; we have such a suspicious, fearful, and
constrained countenance; often turning back, and slinking through narrow
lanes and alleys. I have never failed of knowing a brother thief by his
looks, though I never saw him before. Every man among us keeps his
particular whore, who is however common to us all, when we have a mind
to change. When we have got a booty, if it be in money, we divide it
equally among our companions, and soon squander it away on our vices in
those houses that receive us; for the master and mistress, and the very
tapster, go snacks; and besides make us pay treble reckonings. If our
plunder be plate, watches, rings, snuff-boxes, and the like; we have
customers in all quarters of the town to take them off. I have seen a
tankard worth fifteen pounds sold to a fellow in ---- street for twenty
shillings; and a gold watch for thirty. I have set down his name, and
that of several others in the paper already mentioned. We have setters
watching in corners, and by dead walls, to give us notice when a
gentleman goes by; especially if he be anything in drink. I believe in
my conscience, that if an account were made of a thousand pounds in
stolen goods; considering the low rates we sell them at, the bribes we
must give for concealment, the extortions of alehouse-reckonings, and
other necessary charges, there would not remain fifty pounds clear to be
divided among the robbers. And out of this we must find clothes for our
whores, besides treating them from morning to night; who, in requital,
reward us with nothing but treachery and the pox. For when our money is
gone, they are every moment threatening to inform against us, if we will
not go out to look for more. If anything in this world be like hell, as
I have heard it described by our clergy; the truest picture of it must
be in the back-room of one of our ale-houses at midnight; where a crew of
robbers and their whores are met together after a booty, and are
beginning to grow drunk, from which time, until they are past their
senses, is such a continued horrible noise of cursing, blasphemy,
lewdness, scurrility, and brutish behaviour; such roaring and confusion,
such a clatter of mugs and pots at each other's heads, that Bedlam, in
comparison, is a sober and orderly place: At last they all tumble from
their stoo