When I was placed with the Brandons, it was stipulated that they should remove immediately from Reading; and, whilst I was in their family, they should return there no more. For this purpose the necessary expenses were forwarded to them by an unknown hand. To Lambeth they therefore removed, because it abounded in saw-pits; but this advantage was more than destroyed by its abundance of skittle-grounds. Mr Joseph Brandon had satisfied his conscience by coming into the neighbourhood of the said saw-pits: it showed a direction towards the paths of industry; but whilst he had, through his wife, for nursing me, 81 pounds, 18 shillings per annum, he always preferred knocking down, or seeing knocked down, the nine pins, to the being placed upon a narrow plank, toeing a chalked line. This was not a line of conduct that he actually chalked out for himself; only it so happened that, when he was settled at Lambeth, on the third day he went out to look after work, and going down Stangate Street, he turned up Cut-throat Lane, and, after passing all the turnstiles, he arrived at the Two Jolly Sawyers, himself making a third. In his search for employment, he found it impossible, for the space of a whole month, to get any further. But he was not long permitted to be the ascendant spirit among the top and bottom men. Whether it be that Mrs Brandon overrated her powers of affording sustenance, or that I had suffered through the inclemency of the weather in my three journeys on my natal day, or whether that I was naturally delicate, or perhaps all these causes contributing to it, I fell into a very sickly state, and, before a third month had elapsed, I was forced to another migration. Though no one appeared, both myself and Mrs Brandon were continually watched, and a very superior sort of surgeon in the neighbourhood of Lambeth, from the second day of my arrival there, found some pretence or another to get introduced to my nurse, and took a violent liking to the little, puny, wailing piece of mortality, myself. I was about this time so exceedingly small, that though at the risk of being puerile, I cannot help recording that Joseph Brandon immersed me, all excepting my head, in a quart pot. No one but a Joe Brandon, or a top sawyer, could have had so filthy an idea. I have never been told whether the pot contained any drainings, but I must attribute to this ill-advised act a most plebeian fondness that I have for strong beer, and which seems to be, even in these days of French manners and French wines, unconquerable.