ned, distended pocket-book,--last relic
of sprucer days,--leather of dainty morocco, once elaborately
tooled, patent springs, fairy lock, fit receptacle for bank-notes,
_billets-doux_, memoranda of debts of honour, or pleasurable
engagements. Now how worn, tarnished, greasy, rascallion-like, the
costly bauble! Filled with what motley, unlovable contents: stale
pawn-tickets of foreign _monts de piete_, pledges never henceforth to
be redeemed; scrawls by villanous hands in thievish hierolgyphics; ugly
implements replacing the malachite penknife, the golden toothpick, the
jewelled pencil-case, once so neatly set within their satin lappets.
Ugly implements, indeed,--a file, a gimlet, loaded dice. Pell-mell, with
such more hideous and recent contents, dishonoured evidences of gaudier
summer life,--locks of ladies' hair, love-notes treasured mechanically,
not from amorous sentiment, but perhaps from some vague idea that they
might be of use if those who gave the locks or wrote the notes should
be raised in fortune, and could buy back the memorials of shame. Diving
amidst these miscellaneous documents and treasures, the prowler's hand
rested on some old letters, in clerk-like fair calligraphy, tied round
with a dirty string, and on them, in another and fresher writing, a
scrap that contained an address,--"Samuel Adolphus Poole, Esq., Alhambra
Villa, Regent's Park." "To-morrow, Nix my Dolly; to-morrow," muttered
the tatterdemalion; "but to-night,--plague on it, where is the other
blackguard's direction? Ah, here!" And he extracted from the thievish
scrawls a peculiarly thievish-looking hieroglyph. Now, as he lifts it
up to read by the gaslight, survey him well. Do you not know him? Is
it possible? What! the brilliant sharper! The ruffian exquisite! Jasper
Losely! Can it be? Once before, in the fields of Fawley, we beheld him
out at elbows, seedy, shabby, ragged. But then it was the decay of a
foppish spendthrift,--clothes distained, ill-assorted, yet, still of
fine cloth; shoes in holes, yet still pearl-coloured brodequins. But
now it is the decay of no foppish spendthrift: the rags are not of fine
cloth; the tattered shoes are not the brodequins. The man has fallen far
below the politer grades of knavery, in which the sharper affects the
beau. And the countenance, as we last saw it, if it had lost much of its
earlier beauty, was still incontestably handsome. What with vigour and
health and animal spirits, then on the aspect stil