"Then they'll put you among the poor prisoners, and let you fetch and carry for those that are better off. 'Twill be a sorry end for Buck Chambers, the man who used to keep two servants to attend to his jackboots." "Hang it! 'twas no superfluity of service. No man can be expected to do more than look after three horses or six pairs of boots." "If they do nab you, Bob," said another friend, who had been attracted from a neighbouring table as the conversation grew louder, Mr. Topsparkle sipping his chocolate silently all the while, and listening in a half-abstracted mood, only reflecting within himself much as Romeo did about the apothecary, that here was a fellow who would do anything for gold; "if the limbs of the law do get you in their clutches, let us hope, for the sake of a world that could scarce exist pleasurably without you, that they won't put you into Marjory's." "Marjory's! What, the sponging-house in Shoe Lane!" cried Chambers; "'tis an execrable den, but not a whit worse than their other holes. I have hobbed and nobbed with my friends in most of their rat-traps, and know the geography of them. I'd as lief be at Marjory's as anywhere else, if I must needs have the key turned upon me." "Not just now, Bob; for there was an honest fellow--an Exeter tradesman up in London for a holiday, and arrested by mistake for another--who died of smallpox at Marjory's only yesterday morning; and they say the disease rages in the house, and has done for the last ten days." The Captain sprang to his feet in a fury. "And yet they go on taking prisoners there," he cried; "poor innocent wretches, whose only crime is to have lived like gentlemen! What a vile world we live in!" "A vile world with a vengeance. Marjory's is a gold-mine for Bambridge. He claps all his prisoners into that hell, and makes them pay heavily before he allows them to be removed to the purgatory of another house, or the paradise of prison and chummage. This poor wretch from Exeter had not a stiver about him, so they refused to shift him. He was put in a room with three other men, one of whom was just recovering from the disease. The Exeter man took it badly, and died off-hand." The Captain put on his hat. "Farewell, friends," he said; "I'm off by to-night's fast coach to Bristol, and from thence to the wilds of Connemara. I was not born to be carrion for the vulture Bambridge." He pulled himself together with a debonair movement, and staggered gaily out of the house, amidst the laughter of his friends. "Was there ever such a good-humoured hardened villain?" exclaimed Middleton; "'tis a perpetual conundrum to me how he keeps out of gaol." "He will get there some day," said a gentleman of clerical aspect; "our friend will have his pennyworth of prison, with a noose to follow." Mr. Topsparkle paid his score, and sauntered away.