The new suit of clothes which his mother had purchased for the youth at Cockermouth was gone, and in its place he now wore a man’s ragged old pea-jacket—once blue, but now foxy with age—and a pair of trousers as wide as windsails, and smeared with tar, so that they bore a strong resemblance to coal-sacks; while on his head was a dirty old straw-hat, with a low crown and broad brim, that reminded one strongly of an inverted soup-plate. The jacket was tied together at the button-holes by bits of rope-yarn; for the miserable young gentleman had no shirt to his back, nor had a shoe or a stocking to his feet. The truth was, as the policeman proceeded to explain to his terrified mother, Master Jobby had been what in the eastern districts of the Metropolis is technically termed “skinned.” The lad’s story was soon told. Led on by the delight of the posturers’ performance, he had followed the “School of Acrobats” for miles. Then he had suddenly lighted upon a Punch and Judy Show, and this had so tickled his boyish fancy, that he wandered with it half over London. After this, a street-band of Ethiopian serenaders had bewitched him; their lamp-black faces, their white-paper wristbands and collars, and their fuzzy horsehair wigs, together with the banjos and kettle-drums, and the rattle of the bones, and the chuckle of the nigger-laugh,—all were so new and strange to the boy, that he travelled after them in all directions. Then, as he was growing footsore with his long rambles, an engine at full speed, with the horses galloping, and the firemen in their shiny helmets seated along each side of the machine, went tearing past; and when Jobby saw the people hurry after it, he, too, joined in the crowd. As he ran along, he asked some of the mob who accompanied him, what it all meant; and learning that a fire was raging down at Shadwell, he hurried on the quicker and the lighter to see the sight. But though he kept up with the crowd through many a street and past many a turning, yet, when he reached the Docks, he began to feel so weary, while the sight of the forest of masts showing above the walls and roofs, so took his boyish fancy, that he came to a dead halt, and letting the engine go on its way, entered the gates of the London Docks.