ade him, with a
curse, to take good heart and "be a man." The fast shopboy whose love
of fine company and high living had brought him to this pass, had
shaken off the first shame that was on him, and listened eagerly to the
narratives of successful vice that fell so glibly from the lips of his
older companions. To be transported seemed no such uncommon fate. The
old fellows laughed, and wagged their grey heads with all the glee of
past experience, and listening youth longed for the time when it might
do likewise. Society was the common foe, and magistrates, gaolers, and
parsons were the natural prey of all noteworthy mankind. Only fools were
honest, only cowards kissed the rod, and failed to meditate revenge on
that world of respectability which had wronged them. Each new-comer was
one more recruit to the ranks of ruffianism, and not a man penned in
that reeking den of infamy but became a sworn hater of law, order, and
"free-men." What he might have been before mattered not. He was now
a prisoner, and--thrust into a suffocating barracoon, herded with
the foulest of mankind, with all imaginable depths of blasphemy
and indecency sounded hourly in his sight and hearing--he lost his
self-respect, and became what his gaolers took him to be--a wild beast
to be locked under bolts and bars, lest he should break out and tear
them.

The conversation ran upon the sudden departure of the four. What could
they want with them at that hour?

"I tell you there's something up on deck," says one to the group nearest
him. "Don't you hear all that rumbling and rolling?"

"What did they lower boats for? I heard the dip o' the oars."

"Don't know, mate. P'r'aps a burial job," hazarded a short, stout
fellow, as a sort of happy suggestion.

"One of those coves in the parlour!" said another; and a laugh followed
the speech.

"No such luck. You won't hang your jib for them yet awhile. More like
the skipper agone fishin'."

"The skipper don't go fishin', yer fool. What would he do
fishin'?--special in the middle o' the night."

"That 'ud be like old Dovery, eh?" says a fifth, alluding to an old
grey-headed fellow, who--a returned convict--was again under sentence
for body-snatching.

"Ay," put in a young man, who had the reputation of being the smartest
"crow" (the "look-out" man of a burglars' gang) in London--"'fishers of
men,' as the parson says."

The snuffling imitation of a Methodist preacher was good, and there was
another la