marbles and chalk, which I always carried for the purpose of deception,
and daubed my thumbs and fingers, and even my sleeves and waistcoat with
chalk, as if I had been playing marbles. "Aha, you young villain, he
cried, before he got up to me, you have been playing marbles, have you!
I'll marble you, you rascal." Having accomplished my purpose, I ran away
too fast for him to catch me. That night I heard him say, "One would
think the fellow was too old to play marbles, by this time!--I dont know
what the d--l to do with him." In fact (continued Hodgkinson) we were,
like birds, in the daily habit of playing a thousand tricks to draw away
intruders or suspicion from our nest."

After a concealment protracted to an astonishing length, however, the
nest was at last discovered, the poor birds were dispersed, and our hero
took his ill-fledged flight to perch upon distant sprays, and to pick
his meat from the hand that caters for the sparrow. This was the pivot
upon which the whole life of Hodgkinson turned. The irresistible impulse
of a vigorous genius would, most probably, under any other
circumstances, have sent him ultimately to the goal of his destination;
but this event hastened it, most unpropitiously hastened it, and, in an
evil hour, cast him forth upon the world, a youth, or rather a boy, ill
educated, untutored, unprotected, a precocious adventurer, unprovided
with money, and wholly dependant upon God and his own efforts, not only
for the food that was to sustain his existence, but for the whole stock
of prudence, moral rectitude, and knowledge that were to carry him
through life. On this part of the history of Mr. Hodgkinson the candid
reader will keep his eye steadily and unalterably fixed. If men who have
been brought up with every advantage of excellent education, good
breeding, and moral and religious instruction, and who have not been let
forth from the hand of guardianship, till their knowledge has been
established, and their morals confirmed by habit and good example, are
daily seen running headlong into vice, and, with shipwrecked morals,
sinking into ruin, can we at all wonder if a poor boy, cast forth into
the world in the circumstances of Hodgkinson, and, like a half decked
skiff, with lofty rigging and no ballast but its own intrinsic weight,
drifted out upon the tempestuous ocean of life, without compass, or
chart, or means of keeping reckoning, should have sometimes struck upon
those treacherous shelv