scolded by his wife every morning. More than once, when I went there early, I had audience of him in a turn-up bedstead, with a cut in his forehead or a black eye, bearing witness to his excesses over-night (I am afraid he was quarrelsome in his drink), and he, with a shaking hand, endeavouring to find the needful shillings in one or other of the pockets of his clothes, which lay upon the floor, while his wife, with a baby in her arms and her shoes down at heel, never left off rating him.

Sometimes he had lost his money, and then he would ask me to call again; but his wife had always got some — had taken his, I dare say, while he was drunk — and secretly completed the bargain on the stairs, as we went down together. At the pawnbroker’s shop, too, I began to be very well known.