It was broken by the attorney, who did not quite understand the look of the client; and as he feared that Mr. Johnson might be thinking the costs excessive, Mr. Swelling turned the theme. "Now, I hope the next time you retain my services, they will be needed for some different purpose. I should like to see you make money, and invest it in land or houses, and let me prepare the deeds." "Yes, sir, you shall, when I can get the money to buy the land and houses." "Well, till then good by, Mr. Johnson," said the attorney, rising to bow out his client. "You forgot, sir, I think, to give me a receipt; and I don't think I ever had any for the money I paid you in the prison?" "Oh, very well, Mr. Johnson. Certainly you can have a duly-stamped receipt, if you please; but I hope you don't suppose that I want to cheat you? I should not like to think you reward my anxious services on your behalf by entertaining such an unjust suspicion of me as that?" "No, sir. Oh, no. Nothing of that sort. Only, as you were a-saying that it's as wrong to rob the revenue as it is a private individual, I thought (although I don't see things quite in that light) that you ought to give me one." The attorney's moral philosophy cost him 7_s._ 6_d._ He bit his lip, and sat down; and as penny receipts had not been invented, he wrote on a stamp of the above value a receipt for all the money paid him by the smuggler, who rather enjoyed the joke he had played off on his legal adviser. SWINDLING ACCORDING TO ACT OF PARLIAMENT. I think that the merchants and traders of England, Scotland, and Ireland, or the Chambers of Commerce of the United Kingdom, might lay out a fair sum of money in a worse mode than by retaining me to illustrate, through my experience, some defective acts of Parliament, under which, as I have seen, frequent palpable and sometimes gigantic villany is perpetrated. Whether this notion of my usefulness to the mercantile community and the State is justified or not by any thing I can show, the reader may judge from the following, which is one sample of a stock in my recollections.