came there I don't know, but so it is. I
wish I knew it, but it is difficult. You'll make a capital bonnet; shall
we close?"

"What would the wages be?" I demanded.

"Why, to a first-rate bonnet, as I think you would prove, I could afford
to give from forty to fifty shillings a week."

"Is it possible?" said I.

"Good wages, a'n't they?" said the man.

"First rate," said I; "bonneting is more profitable than reviewing."

"Anan?" said the man.

"Or translating; I don't think the Armenian would have paid me at that
rate for translating his Esop."

"Who is he?" said the man.

"Esop?"

"No, I know what that is, Esop's cant for a hunchback; but t'other?"

"You should know," said I.

"Never saw the man in all my life."

"Yes, you have," said I, "and felt him too; don't you remember the
individual from whom you took the pocket-book?"

"Oh, that was he; well, the less said about that matter the better; I
have left off that trade, and taken to this, which is a much better.
Between ourselves, I am not sorry that I did not carry off that
pocket-book; if I had, it might have encouraged me in the trade, in
which, had I remained, I might have been lagged, sent abroad, as I had
been already imprisoned; so I determined to leave it off at all hazards,
though I was hard up, not having a penny in the world."

"And wisely resolved," said I, "it was a bad and dangerous trade; I
wonder you should ever have embraced it."

"It is all very well talking," said the man, "but there is a reason for
everything; I am the son of a Jewess, by a military officer,"--and then
the man told me his story. I shall not repeat the man's story, it was a
poor one, a vile one; at last he observed, "So that affair which you know
of determined me to leave the filching trade, and take up with a more
honest and safe one; so at last I thought of the pea and thimble, but I
wanted funds, especially to pay for lessons at the hands of a master, for
I knew little about it."

"Well," said I, "how did you get over that difficulty?"

"Why," said the man, "I thought I should never have got over it. What
funds could I raise? I had nothing to sell; the few clothes I had I
wanted, for we of the thimble must always appear decent, or nobody would
come near us. I was at my wits' ends; at last I got over my difficulty
in the strangest way in the world."

"What was that?"

"By an old thing which I had picked up some time before--a book."

"A book?" sa