s in which his dismal calling
suffers him to sleep at all), thou didst creep up the ladder, and didst
see the unconscious miser at his nightly work, and after the sight didst
steal down again, smiling,--no; since that night, no schoolboy ever more
rootedly and ruthlessly set his mind upon nest of linnet than thine was
set upon the stores in Beck's mattress.

And yet why, O lawyer, should rigid moralists blame thee more than such
of thy tribe as live, honoured and respectable, upon the frail and the
poor? Who among them ever left loft or mattress while a rap could be
wrung from either? Matters it to Astraea whether the spoliation be made
thus nakedly and briefly, or by all the acknowledged forms in which,
item on item, six-and-eightpence on six-and-eightpence, the inexorable
hand closes at length on the last farthing of duped despair? Not--Heaven
forbid!--that we make thee, foul Nicholas Grabman, a type for all the
class called attorneys-at-law! Noble hearts, liberal minds, are there
amongst that brotherhood, we know and have experienced; but a type
art thou of those whom want and error and need have proved--alas! too
well--the lawyers of the poor. And even while we write, and even while
ye read, many a Grabman steals from helpless toil the savings of a life.

Ye poor hoards,--darling delights of your otherwise joyless owner,--how
easily has his very fondness made ye the prey of the spoiler! How
gleefully, when the pence swelled into a shilling, have they been
exchanged into the new bright piece of silver, the newest and brightest
that could be got; then the shillings into crowns, then the crowns into
gold,--got slyly and at a distance, and contemplated with what rapture;
so that at last the total lay manageable and light in its radiant
compass. And what a total! what a surprise to Grabman! Had it been but
a sixpence, he would have taken it; but to grasp sovereigns by the
handful, it was too much for him; and as he rose, he positively laughed,
from a sense of fun.

But amongst his booty there was found one thing that specially moved
his mirth: it was a child's coral, with its little bells. Who could have
given Beck such a bauble, or how Beck could have refrained from turning
it into money, would have been a fit matter for speculation. But it was
not that at which Grabman chuckled; he laughed, first because it was
an emblem of the utter childishness and folly of the creature he was
leaving penniless, and secondly, becau