‘I wish I did,’ said the man; ‘I would give ten pounds and more to know the language of the Rommany Chals. There’s some of it in the language of the pea and thimble; how it came there I don’t know, but so it is. I wish I knew it, but it is difficult. You’ll make a capital bonnet; shall we close?’ ‘What would the wages be?’ I demanded. ‘Why, to a first-rate bonnet, as I think you would prove, I could afford to give from forty to fifty shillings a week.’ ‘Is it possible?’ said I. ‘Good wages, ain’t they?’ said the man. ‘First-rate,’ said I; ‘bonneting is more profitable than reviewing.’ ‘Anan?’ said the man. ‘Or translating; I don’t think the Armenian would have paid me at that rate for translating his Esop.’ ‘Who is he?’ said the man. ‘Esop?’ ‘No, I know what that is, Esop’s cant for a hunchback; but t’other?’ ‘You should know,’ said I. ‘Never saw the man in all my life.’ ‘Yes, you have,’ said I, ‘and felt him too; don’t you remember the individual from whom you took the pocket-book?’ ‘Oh, that was he; well, the less said about that matter the better; I have left off that trade, and taken to this, which is a much better. Between ourselves, I am not sorry that I did not carry off that pocket-book; if I had, it might have encouraged me in the trade, in which had I remained, I might have been lagged, sent abroad, as I had been already imprisoned; so I determined to leave it off at all hazards, though I was hard up, not having a penny in the world.’ ‘And wisely resolved,’ said I; ‘it was a bad and dangerous trade, I wonder you should ever have embraced it.’ ‘It is all very well talking,’ said the man, ‘but there is a reason for everything; I am the son of a Jewess, by a military officer’—and then the man told me his story. I shall not repeat the man’s story, it was a poor one, a vile one; at last he observed, ‘So that affair which you know of determined me to leave the filching trade, and take up with a more honest and safe one; so at last I thought of the pea and thimble, but I wanted funds, especially to pay for lessons at the hands of a master, for I knew little about it.’ ‘Well,’ said I, ‘how did you get over that difficulty?’ ‘Why,’ said the man, ‘I thought I should never have got over it. What funds could I raise? I had nothing to sell; the few clothes I had I wanted, for we of the thimble must always appear decent, or nobody would come near us. I was at my wits’ ends; at last I got over my difficulty in the strangest way in the world.’ ‘What was that?’ ‘By an old thing which I had picked up some time before—a book.’ ‘A book?’ said I.