Daily I take my stand in the same vile street, and nightly
am I driven to the minor theatres--to oyster-shops--to desperation!
One day, when empty and unoccupied, I was hailed by two police-officers
who were bearing between them a prisoner. It was the seducer of my
second ill-fated mistress; a first crime had done its usual work, it had
prepared the mind for a second, and a worse: the seducer had done a deed
of deeper guilt, and _I_ bore him one stage towards the gallows. Many
months after, a female called me at midnight: she was decked in tattered
finery, and what with fatigue and recent indulgence in strong liquors,
she was scarcely sensible, but she possessed dim traces of past beauty.
I can say nothing more of her, but that it was the fugitive wife whom I
had borne to Brighton so many years ago. No words of mine could paint
the living warning that I beheld. What had been the sorrows of unmerited
desertion and unkindness supported by conscious rectitude, compared with
the degraded guilt, the hopeless anguish, that I then saw?
I regret to say, I was last month nigh committing manslaughter; I broke
down in the Strand and dislocated the shoulder of a rich old maid.
I cannot help thinking that she deserved the visitation, for, as she
stepped into me in Oxford Street, she exclaimed, loud enough to be heard
by all neighbouring pedestrians, "Dear me! how dirty! I never was in
a hackney conveyance before!"--though I well remembered having been
favoured with her company very often.
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