knew all the best tables in
town, and the marker at Hunt's could only give him ten. He had some
fashionable acquaintances too, and you might see him walking arm-in-arm
with such gentlemen as my Lord Vauxhall, the Marquess of Billingsgate,
or Captain Buff; and at the same time nodding to young Moses, the
dandy bailiff; or Loder, the gambling-house keeper; or Aminadab, the
cigar-seller in the Quadrant. Sometimes he wore a pair of moustaches,
and was called Captain Walker; grounding his claim to that title upon
the fact of having once held a commission in the service of Her Majesty
the Queen of Portugal. It scarcely need be said that he had been through
the Insolvent Court many times. But to those who did not know his
history intimately there was some difficulty in identifying him with the
individual who had so taken the benefit of the law, inasmuch as in
his schedule his name appeared as Hooker Walker, wine-merchant,
commission-agent, music-seller, or what not. The fact is, that though he
preferred to call himself Howard, Hooker was his Christian name, and it
had been bestowed on him by his worthy old father, who was a clergyman,
and had intended his son for that profession. But as the old gentleman
died in York gaol, where he was a prisoner for debt, he was never able
to put his pious intentions with regard to his son into execution; and
the young fellow (as he was wont with many oaths to assert) was thrown
on his own resources, and became a man of the world at a very early age.

What Mr. Howard Walker's age was at the time of the commencement of this
history, and, indeed, for an indefinite period before or afterwards, it
is impossible to determine. If he were eight-and-twenty, as he asserted
himself, Time had dealt hardly with him: his hair was thin, there were
many crows'-feet about his eyes, and other signs in his countenance
of the progress of decay. If, on the contrary, he were forty, as Sam
Snaffle declared, who himself had misfortunes in early life, and vowed
he knew Mr. Walker in Whitecross Street Prison in 1820, he was a very
young-looking person considering his age. His figure was active and
slim, his leg neat, and he had not in his whiskers a single white hair.

It must, however, be owned that he used Mr. Eglantine's Regenerative
Unction (which will make your whiskers as black as your boot), and, in
fact, he was a pretty constant visitor at that gentleman's emporium;
dealing with him largely for soaps and art