res with respect to the smashers'
system. I confess that I would have been hanged before I would have done
so, after having reaped the profit of it; that is, I think so now, seated
comfortably in my inn, with my bottle of champagne before me. He,
however, did not show himself carrion; he would not betray his
companions, who had behaved very handsomely to him, having given the son
of a lord, a great barrister, not a hundred-pound forged bill, but a
hundred hard guineas, to plead his cause, and another ten, to induce him,
after pleading, to put his hand to his breast, and say that, upon his
honour, he believed the prisoner at the bar to be an honest and injured
man. No; I am glad to be able to say that my father did not show himself
exactly carrion, though I could almost have wished he had let himself . . .
However, I am here with my bottle of champagne and the Romany Rye, and
he was in his cell, with bread and water and the prison chaplain. He
took an affectionate leave of me before he was sent away, giving me three
out of five guineas, all the money he had left. He was a kind man, but
not exactly fitted to fill my grandfather's shoes. I afterwards learned
that he died of fever as he was being carried across the sea.

"During the 'sizes I had made acquaintance with old Fulcher. I was in
the town on my father's account, and he was there on his son's, who,
having committed a small larceny, was in trouble. Young Fulcher,
however, unlike my father, got off, though he did not give the son of a
lord a hundred guineas to speak for him, and ten more to pledge his
sacred honour for his honesty, but gave Counsellor P . . . one-and-twenty
shillings to defend him, who so frightened the principal evidence, a
plain honest farming man, that he flatly contradicted what he had first
said, and at last acknowledged himself to be all the rogues in the world,
and, amongst other things, a perjured villain. Old Fulcher, before he
left the town with his son,--and here it will be well to say that he and
his son left it in a kind of triumph, the base drummer of a militia
regiment, to whom they had given half-a-crown, beating his drum before
them--Old Fulcher, I say, asked me to go and visit him, telling me where,
at such a time, I might find him and his caravan and family; offering, if
I thought fit, to teach me basket-making: so, after my father had been
sent off, I went and found up old Fulcher, and became his apprentice in
the basket-m