that
pocket-book; if I had, it might have encouraged me in the trade, in which
had I remained, I might have been lagged, sent abroad, as I had been
already imprisoned; so I determined to leave it off at all hazards,
though I was hard up, not having a penny in the world.'

'And wisely resolved,' said I; 'it was a bad and dangerous trade, I
wonder you should ever have embraced it.'

'It is all very well talking,' said the man, 'but there is a reason for
everything; I am the son of a Jewess, by a military officer'--and then
the man told me his story. I shall not repeat the man's story, it was a
poor one, a vile one; at last he observed, 'So that affair which you know
of determined me to leave the filching trade, and take up with a more
honest and safe one; so at last I thought of the pea and thimble, but I
wanted funds, especially to pay for lessons at the hands of a master, for
I knew little about it.'

'Well,' said I, 'how did you get over that difficulty?'

'Why,' said the man, 'I thought I should never have got over it. What
funds could I raise? I had nothing to sell; the few clothes I had I
wanted, for we of the thimble must always appear decent, or nobody would
come near us. I was at my wits' ends; at last I got over my difficulty
in the strangest way in the world.'

'What was that?'

'By an old thing which I had picked up some time before--a book.'

'A book?' said I.

'Yes, which I had taken out of your lordship's pocket one day as you were
walking the streets in a great hurry. I thought it was a pocket-book at
first, full of bank-notes, perhaps,' continued he, laughing. 'It was
well for me, however, that it was not, for I should have soon spent the
notes; as it was, I had flung the old thing down with an oath, as soon as
I brought it home. When I was so hard up, however, after the affair with
that friend of yours, I took it up one day, and thought I might make
something by it to support myself a day with. Chance or something else
led me into a grand shop; there was a man there who seemed to be the
master, talking to a jolly, portly old gentleman, who seemed to be a
country squire. Well, I went up to the first, and offered it for sale;
he took the book, opened it at the title-page, and then all of a sudden
his eyes glistened, and he showed it to the fat, jolly gentleman, and his
eyes glistened too, and I heard him say "How singular!" and then the two
talked together in a speech I didn't understand