In the days precedent to that lucky contretemps in Duke Street, Sad Jack had once possessed a donkey. Acquiring the beast, by a stroke of good fortune, through a raffle conducted in an inn yard over the effects of a deceased tinker, he had used her to bear the burden of the instrument which, in his ploddings abroad, made so heavy physical an addition to the weight of melancholy which oppressed him. Thenceforth patient Griselda acted the part of minstrel-boy to the wandering harpist, bearing on her sturdy little back the dumb intervals between performance and performance, and standing apathetic by while the pence for her night’s board and lodging and her master’s were being charmed from a reluctant public. She was a docile little ass and intelligent, and between her and her owner was quickly established a comradeship which made their too soon severance a source of poignant grief to at least the human one of them. It happened in this way-- They came chancing together one day into the broad thoroughfare of Cornhill, where, about the neighbourhood of the great conduit, near the east end, they halted and prepared for their parts. Here, hard by, stood the “tun,” or lock-up, a square detached building used for the temporary impounding of night offenders; and it may have been their contiguity to that place of ill savour which procured them the company which was responsible for their separation. Rogues gravitate of instinct towards the gallows, and your thief is never to be found hovering so certainly as about the buildings where Justice inhabits. However that might be, and whether it were owing to the insolvency or the insensibility of his audience I cannot say; but the net result to the musician showed itself in such a beggarly taking, that he was driven to bring his performance to a short end, with a view to shifting his ground and endeavouring to discover a more profitable pitch. He loaded up Griselda and moved off, his expression, perhaps, reflecting the nature of his inward disappointment. But he had not trudged fifty paces when his dismal preoccupation became conscious of a voice that pursued and arrested him. “Hillo, my troll-away!” He turned about, to see a figure approaching. It was that of a common young fellow, white-faced, dirty, but with a world of shifty cunning in his diminutive optics. His dress--some refuse of finery cheapened from the hangman--overhung his puny limbs, he had packthread in his shoes, and he wore his hat with a jack-a-dandy cock that did nothing but emphasize its extreme age and greasiness No one less unworldly than our musician would have stopped to parley with a creature so obviously questionable. But in truth Jack was, in the slang of the canting tribe, a born “buzzard,” or pigeon. “What now?” demanded he. “Heard ye,” said the stranger, coming up with a rather panting grin, “harping it yonder, over against lob’s pound; and, thinks I to myself, ‘Here be the very man for my master.’” “What master?”