might be _un_hanged, and knocking about the streets of London; in which case it would have been a perfect god-send to him that here lay an opening (of _my_ contrivance, not _his_) for requesting the opinion of a jury on the amount of _solatium_ due to his wounded feelings in an action on the passage in the Confessions. To have indicated even the street would have been enough. Because there could surely be but one such Grecian in Greek Street, or but one that realized the other conditions of the unknown quantity. There was also a separate danger not absolutely so laughable as it sounds. Me there was little chance that the attorney should meet; but my book he might easily have met (supposing always that the warrant of _Sus. per coll._ had not yet on _his_ account travelled down to Newgate.) For he was literary; admired literature; and, as a lawyer, he wrote on some subjects fluently; Might he not publish _his_ Confessions? Or, which would be worse, a supplement to mine--printed so as exactly to match? In which case I should have had the same affliction that Gibbon the historian dreaded so much; viz. that of seeing a refutation of himself, and his own answer to the refutation, all bound up in one and the same self-combating volume. Besides, he would have cross-examined me before the public in Old Bailey style; no story, the most straightforward that ever was told, could be sure to stand _that_. And my readers might be left in a state of painful doubt whether _he_ might not, after all, have been a model of suffering innocence--I (to say the kindest thing possible) plagued with the natural treacheries of a schoolboy's memory. In taking leave of this case and the remembrances connected with it, let me say that, although really believing in the probability of the attorney's having at least found his way to Australia, I had no satisfaction in thinking of that result. I knew my friend to be the very perfection of a scamp. And in the running account between us, (I mean, in the ordinary sense, as to money,) the balance could not be in _his_ favour; since I, on receiving a sum of money, (considerable in the eyes of us both,) had transferred pretty nearly the whole of it to _him_, for the purpose ostensibly held out to me (but of course a hoax) of purchasing certain law "stamps;" for he was then pursuing a diplomatic correspondence with various Jews who lent money to young heirs, in some trifling proportion on my own insignificant account, but much more truly on the account of Lord A----t, my young friend. On the other side, he had given to me simply the reliques of his breakfast-table, which itself was hardly more than a relique. But in this he was not to blame. He could not give to me what he had not for himself, nor sometimes for the poor starving child whom I now suppose to have been his illegitimate daughter. So desperate was the running fight, yard-arm to yard-arm, which he maintained with creditors