here you must give some HARD KNOCKS
too--ha! ha!--do you gomprehend?--and you shall be a general instead of
a gaptain--ha! ha!"

"A general in a red coat, Mr. Stiffelkind?"

"Yes, a GENERAL BOSTMAN!--ha! ha! I have been vid your old friend,
Bunting, and he has an uncle in the Post Office, and he has got you de
place--eighteen shillings a veek, you rogue, and your goat. You must not
oben any of de letters you know."

And so it was--I, Robert Stubbs, Esquire, became the vile thing he
named--a general postman!

*****

I was so disgusted with Stiffelkind's brutal jokes, which were now more
brutal than ever, that when I got my place in the Post Office, I never
went near the fellow again: for though he had done me a favor in
keeping me from starvation, he certainly had done it in a very rude,
disagreeable manner, and showed a low and mean spirit in SHOVING me
into such a degraded place as that of postman. But what had I to do? I
submitted to fate, and for three years or more, Robert Stubbs, of the
North Bungay Fencibles, was--

I wonder nobody recognized me. I lived in daily fear the first year: but
afterwards grew accustomed to my situation, as all great men will do,
and wore my red coat as naturally as if I had been sent into the world
only for the purpose of being a letter-carrier.

I was first in the Whitechapel district, where I stayed for nearly three
years, when I was transferred to Jermyn Street and Duke Street--famous
places for lodgings. I suppose I left a hundred letters at a house in
the latter street, where lived some people who must have recognized me
had they but once chanced to look at me.

You see that when I left Sloffemsquiggle, and set out in the gay world,
my mamma had written to me a dozen times at least; but I never answered
her, for I knew she wanted money, and I detest writing. Well, she
stopped her letters, finding she could get none from me:--but when I was
in the Fleet, as I told you, I wrote repeatedly to my dear mamma, and
was not a little nettled at her refusing to notice me in my distress,
which is the very time one most wants notice.

Stubbs is not an uncommon name; and though I saw MRS. STUBBS on a little
bright brass plate, in Duke street, and delivered so many letters to the
lodgers in her house, I never thought of asking who she was, or whether
she was my relation, or not.

One day the young woman who took in the letters had not got change, and
she called her mistress. An old