hat a gentleman of your rank
will condescend to walk three paces with one of mine. You smile, Sir;
perhaps you think I should not class myself among gentlemen; and yet
I have as good a right to the name as most of the set. I belong to
no trade--I follow no calling: I rove where I list, and rest where I
please: in short, I know no occupation but my indolence, and no law but
my will. Now, Sir, may I not call myself a gentleman?"

"Of a surety!" quoth I; "you seem to me to hold a middle rank between a
half-pay captain and the king of the gipsies."

"You have hit it, Sir," rejoined my companion, with a slight laugh. He
was now by my side, and as we walked on, I had leisure more minutely to
examine him. He was a middle-sized, and rather athletic man, apparently
about the age of thirty-eight. He was attired in a dark blue frock coat,
which was neither shabby nor new, but ill made, and much too large
and long for its present possessor; beneath this was a faded velvet
waistcoat, that had formerly, like the Persian ambassador's tunic,
"blushed with crimson, and blazed with gold;" but which might now have
been advantageously exchanged in Monmouth-street for the lawful sum
of two shillings and nine-pence; under this was an inner vest of the
cashmere shawl pattern, which seemed much too new for the rest of the
dress. Though his shirt was of a very unwashed hue, I remarked, with
some suspicion, that it was of a very respectable fineness; and a pin,
which might be paste, or could be diamond, peeped below a tattered and
dingy black kid stock, like a gipsey's eye beneath her hair.

His trowsers were of a light grey, and Providence, or the tailor,
avenged itself upon them, for the prodigal length bestowed upon their
ill-sorted companion, the coat; for they were much too tight for the
muscular limbs they concealed, and rising far above the ankle, exhibited
the whole of a thick Wellington boot, which was the very picture of
Italy upon the map.

The face of the man was common-place and ordinary; one sees a hundred
such, every day, in Fleet-street or the 'Change; the features were
small, irregular, and somewhat flat: yet, when you looked twice upon the
countenance, there was something marked and singular in the expression,
which fully atoned for the commonness of the features. The right
eye turned away from the left, in that watchful squint which seems
constructed on the same considerate plan as those Irish guns, made
for shooting round