still less.

But to return to myself. I spent that entire day in the man's pocket,
too ill to care what became of me, and too weak to notice much of what
passed around me. I was conscious of others like Stumpy coming up the
creaking stairs and offering their ill-gotten gains as he had done; and
I was conscious towards evening, when the last rays of the setting sun
were struggling feebly through the dingy window, of a groan in that
dismal corner, deeper than all that had gone before. Then I knew Old
Sal was dead. In an hour the body was laid in its rude coffin, and had
made its last journey down those stairs: and that night another outcast
slept in her corner.

The night was like the one which had preceded it, foul and sickening. I
was thankful that my illness had sufficiently deadened my senses to
render me unable to hear and see all that went on during those hours.
Morning came at length, and one by one the youthful lodgers took their
departure. When the last had left, my possessor produced a bag, into
which he thrust me, with a score or more of other articles acquired as I
had been acquired; then, locking the door behind him, he descended the
stairs and stepped out.

Oh, the delight of that breath of fresh morning air! Even as it
struggled in through the crevices and cracks of that old bag, it was
like a breath of Paradise, after the vile, pestilential atmosphere of
that room!

As we went on, I had leisure to observe the company of which I formed
one. What a motley crew we were! There were watches, snuff-boxes, and
pencils, bracelets and brooches, handkerchiefs and gloves, studs, pins,
and rings--all huddled together higgledy-piggledy. We none of us spoke
to one another, nor inquired whither we were going; we were a sad,
spiritless assembly, and to some of us it mattered little what became of
us.

Still I could not help wondering if the man in whose possession I and my
fellow-prisoners found ourselves was Stumpy's "uncle," referred to by
that miserable clay pipe. If he was, I felt I could not candidly
congratulate that youth on his relative. What he could want with us all
I could not imagine.

If I had been the only watch, and if there hadn't been half a dozen
scarf-pins, snuff-boxes, and pencils, it would not have been so
extraordinary. It would have been easy enough to imagine the person of
Stumpy's "aunt" decorated with one brooch, two bracelets, and three or
four rings; but when instead of tha