The rider stopped, and, loosing his foot from the stirrup at the side nearest the miserable dwelling, close to which his horse now stood, kicked the door. It opened, and a figure appeared, the outlines of which, as shewn by the light from behind, were easily to be recognised, as those of the female equestrian. From the length of time, however, which has elapsed, it may not be quite so easy to trace in her that bold strolling thief and beggar, whom we have seen in the very first chapter of this history, treat poor Edmund so cruelly. Yet she is the same individual. By origin she was, what in Cumberland is called, a bottom lass; the most opprobrious of terms, meaning one of those creatures, found to swarm in that region of darkness, denominated, in the country of which we speak, “the bottom.” Creatures who, if they can claim a mother for the first few weeks after their birth, rarely can a father. We are not aware that the profligate being whose history we are thus tracing back, was ever christened; yet, in some way or other, she had obtained the appellation of Jin of the Gins. Jin, notwithstanding her lack of noble birth, happened to possess, in extreme youth, some natural beauty; and by that circumstance was promoted, at the early age of seventeen, to the rank of nominal wife to a travelling tinker. With him, for a few years, she travelled, begged, pilfered, and drank. During this period it was that Edmund had, for the sake of his fine clothes, become her prey. Shortly after having abandoned him, she was caught in the act of achieving a more than usually daring robbery, for which she must have been hung, had she not escaped from the magistrates before she could be committed to the county jail. On this occasion she returned, at about three and twenty, to her old asylum, the bottom; where, shrouded in coal-dust and darkness, she has, up to the present period, which brings her to about the age of three or four and forty, laboured at bottom-work in the bowels of the earth, and often beneath the bed of the ocean, amid hundreds of her own description. To account for the equestrian prowess of Jin of the Gins, we must here remark, that near to ⸺haven, and not far from the row of houses just described, there is a broad covered way, leading down to the works by a descent so gradual, that horses, cars, and even waggons can enter by it; while daily may be seen emerging from it troops of colliers, mounted on such animals as in a late chapter we have described, accoutred too with chains which, like the traces of a just-loosed carriage-horse, trail on either side, ready to hook to cars, waggons, &c. But to return to the scene which was just commencing. The rider, in answer to whose summons we left Jin in the act of opening the door, on the threshold of which she now stood, accosted her thus, “Well, Jin of the Gins, how is it with you?” “Nane the bether for yeer axin,” she retorted. “Is Sir Sydney come?” continued the querist.