"Beggin' your pardon, guv'nor, but you are a muff! You never thought I meant a gen'leman like you to take to a beastly trade like that. I meant the thimble and peas, you know, at fairs, and such like. It's all fair, you know. You tell 'em they don't know where the pea is and they don't. I know a friend o' mine'll put you up to it for five or six bob. Bless you! there's room for free trade and money made." Thomas could hardly be indignant with Jim for speaking according to his kind. But when he looked into it, it stung him to the heart to think that every magistrate would regard him as capable of taking to the profession of thimble-rigging after what he had been already guilty of. Yet in all his dealings with cards Thomas had been scrupulously honorable. He said no more to Jim about finding something to do. They had gone a good way, and Thomas's strength was beginning to fail him quite. Several times Jim had inquired after the _Marmaid_, always in public-houses, where he paid for the information or none, as the case might be, by putting a name upon something at Thomas's expense; so that he began to be rather uplifted. At length he called out joyfully: "Here's a fishy one, guv'nor, _at last_! Come along." So saying, he pushed the swing door, to which was attached a leather strap to keep it from swinging outward, and entered. It admitted them to a bar served by a big fat man with an apron whose substratum was white at the depth of several strata of dirt, and a nose much more remarkable for color than drawing, being in both more like a half-ripe mulberry than anything else in nature. He had little round, watery eyes, and a face indicative of nothing in particular, for it had left its original conformation years behind. As soon as they entered, Jim went straight up to the landlord, and stared at him for a few moments across the counter. "You don't appear to know me, guv'nor?" he said, for the many things he had drank to find the way had made him _barky_. His vocabulary of address, it will be remarked, was decidedly defective. "Well, I can't take upon me to say as I do," answered the man, putting his thumbs in the strings of his apron, and looking at Jim with a mixture of effort and suspicion on his puffy face. "And I'll be bound to say," remarked Jim, turning toward Thomas, "that you don't know this gen'leman either. Do 'ee now guv'nor? On yer honor, right as a trivet? No, ye don't." "Can't say I do." "Look at him, then. Ain't he fit to remember? Don't he look respectable?" "Come, none o' your chaff! Say what you've got to say. What do you want?" "Cut it short, Jim," said Thomas. "How's your young marmaid as took to the water so nat'ral at the Horsleydown tother day, Mr. Potts?" asked Jim, leaning on his elbows on the counter. "Jolly," answered the landlord. "Was you by?"