her five children, but of every single person in the
neighbourhood who had an opportunity of seeing and becoming acquainted
with Master Tom.

A celebrated philosopher--I think Miss Edgeworth--has broached the
consolatory doctrine, that in intellect and disposition all human beings
are entirely equal, and that circumstance and education are the causes
of the distinctions and divisions which afterwards unhappily take place
among them. Not to argue this question, which places Jack Howard and
Jack Thurtell on an exact level,--which would have us to believe that
Lord Melbourne is by natural gifts and excellences a man as honest,
brave, and far-sighted as the Duke of Wellington,--which would make out
that Lord Lyndhurst is, in point of principle, eloquence, and political
honesty, no better than Mr. O'Connell,--not, I say, arguing this
doctrine, let us simply state that Master Thomas Billings (for, having
no other, he took the name of the worthy people who adopted him) was in
his long-coats fearfully passionate, screaming and roaring perpetually,
and showing all the ill that he COULD show. At the age of two, when
his strength enabled him to toddle abroad, his favourite resort was
the coal-hole or the dung-heap: his roarings had not diminished in the
least, and he had added to his former virtues two new ones,--a love
of fighting and stealing; both which amiable qualities he had many
opportunities of exercising every day. He fought his little adoptive
brothers and sisters; he kicked and cuffed his father and mother; he
fought the cat, stamped upon the kittens, was worsted in a severe battle
with the hen in the backyard; but, in revenge, nearly beat a little
sucking-pig to death, whom he caught alone and rambling near his
favourite haunt, the dung-hill. As for stealing, he stole the eggs,
which he perforated and emptied; the butter, which he ate with or
without bread, as he could find it; the sugar, which he cunningly
secreted in the leaves of a "Baker's Chronicle," that nobody in the
establishment could read; and thus from the pages of history he used to
suck in all he knew--thieving and lying namely; in which, for his years,
he made wonderful progress. If any followers of Miss Edgeworth and the
philosophers are inclined to disbelieve this statement, or to set it
down as overcharged and distorted, let them be assured that just this
very picture was, of all the pictures in the world, taken from nature.
I, Ikey Solomons, once had