a dear little brother who could steal before
he could walk (and this not from encouragement,--for, if you know the
world, you must know that in families of our profession the point of
honour is sacred at home,--but from pure nature)--who could steal, I
say, before he could walk, and lie before he could speak; and who, at
four and a half years of age, having attacked my sister Rebecca on some
question of lollipops, had smitten her on the elbow with a fire-shovel,
apologising to us by saying simply, "---- her, I wish it had been her
head!" Dear, dear Aminadab! I think of you, and laugh these philosophers
to scorn. Nature made you for that career which you fulfilled: you
were from your birth to your dying a scoundrel; you COULDN'T have been
anything else, however your lot was cast; and blessed it was that you
were born among the prigs,--for had you been of any other profession,
alas! alas! what ills might you have done! As I have heard the author of
"Richelieu," "Siamese Twins," etc. say "Poeta nascitur non fit," which
means that though he had tried ever so much to be a poet, it was all
moonshine: in the like manner, I say, "ROAGUS nascitur, non fit." We
have it from nature, and so a fig for Miss Edgeworth.

In this manner, then, while his father, blessed with a wealthy wife, was
leading, in a fine house, the life of a galley-slave; while his mother,
married to Mr. Hayes, and made an honest women of, as the saying is, was
passing her time respectably in Warwickshire, Mr. Thomas Billings
was inhabiting the same county, not cared for by either of them; but
ordained by Fate to join them one day, and have a mighty influence upon
the fortunes of both. For, as it has often happened to the traveller in
the York or the Exeter coach to fall snugly asleep in his corner, and on
awaking suddenly to find himself sixty or seventy miles from the place
where Somnus first visited him: as, we say, although you sit still,
Time, poor wretch, keeps perpetually running on, and so must run day
and night, with never a pause or a halt of five minutes to get a drink,
until his dying day; let the reader imagine that since he left Mrs.
Hayes and all the other worthy personages of this history, in the last
chapter, seven years have sped away; during which, all our heroes and
heroines have been accomplishing their destinies.

Seven years of country carpentering, or rather trading, on the part of a
husband, of ceaseless scolding, violence, and disconte