inutes startled me a little; and, for a week, I
meditated with some seriousness on the superior gaiety of a life spent
in paving the streets, driving a wagon, or answering the knocker of a
door. But the "hour" again overflowed me. I was walking it off in Regent
Street, when an old fellow-victim met me, and prescribed a trot to
Newmarket. The prescription was taken, and the hour was certainly got
rid of. But the remedy was costly; for my betting-book left me minus ten
thousand pounds. I returned to town like a patient from a
watering-place; relieved of every thing but the disease that took me
there. My last shilling remained among the noble blacklegs; but nothing
could rob me of a fragment of my superfluous time, and I brought even a
tenfold allowance of it back. But every disease has a crisis; and when a
lounge through the streets became at once useless and inconvenient--when
the novelty of being cut by all my noble friends, and of being seduously
followed by that generation who, unlike the fickle world, reserve their
tipstaff attentions for the day of adversity, had lost its zest, and I
was thinking whether time was to be better fought off by a plunge to the
bottom of the Thames, or by the muzzle of one of Manton's hair-
triggers--I was saved by a plunge into the King's Bench. There life was
new, friendship was undisguised, my coat was not an object of scorn, my
exploits were fashion, my duns were inadmissible, and my very captors
were turned into my humble servants. There, too, my nature, always
social, had its full indulgence; for there I found, rather to my
surprise, nine-tenths of my most accomplished acquaintance. But the
enemy still made his way; and I had learned to yawn, in spite of
billiards and ball-playing, when _the_ Act let me loose into the great
world again. Good-luck, too, had prepared a surprise for my _debut_. I
had scarcely exhibited myself in the streets, when I discovered that
every man of my _set_ was grown utterly blind whenever I happened to
walk on the same side of the way, and that I might as well have been
buried a century. I was absurd enough to be indignant; for nothing can
be more childish than any delicacy when a man cannot bet on the rubber.
But one morning a knock came to my attic-door which startled me by its
professional vigour. An attorney entered. I had now nothing to fear, for
the man whom no one will trust cannot well be in debt; and for once I
faced an attorney without a palpitatio