"Tickle," said I, "the old curmudgeon has a daughter: I'll marry her." "No you won't," said my friend, shaking his head mournfully: "old Goldfist is too well acquainted with your affairs; and unless you have his consent, what will you get by her?" "Tickle," said I, "I must marry somebody, or be ruined. But stay, there's my uncle; now, my dear fellow, who is he?" "Faith," said Tickle, "I don't know; always supposed he belonged to the Apocrypha, and was used to argue duns into good manners: nobody sues a young fellow that has good expectations from a rich uncle. But, now I think of it, I believe you did once tell me you had an uncle--some vagabond trading fellow or other--in the west; but I never heard you say you expected any thing of him. I thought you called him Wiggins; but Sniggles says Wilkins. All's one, however; for I remember you said he had brats of his own." I began to feel uncomfortable; and, upon questioning my friend further, I discovered that my situation was far from being agreeable. I had a horrible quantity of debts on my shoulders, and no fund to discharge them; and, what was worse, I found that my means of subsistence were not only precarious, but I had good reason to fear they were any thing but reputable. My dear friend John Tickle, though a gentleman and dandy, it was plain, was a personage who lived by his wits; and I began to see that Mr. I. D. Dawkins was another. From Tickle's expressions, I perceived that our chief dependance lay in the noble trade of pigeon-hunting. As this is a word some of my readers may be too unsophisticated to understand, I will explain it, and in very few words. As there are in the world young fellows of plebeian origin but full pockets, who are ambitious to figure in elegant society, so there are also in elegant society sundry youths of better fame than fortune, who are willing to patronise them, provided any thing can be made by their condescension; in which case, the happy Phaeton is taught to spend his money in ways most advantageous to his patrons, though by no means to his own profit. Such a young gentleman is then called a pigeon, and is allowed to flutter in the sunbeams, while his eagle-clawed friends are helping themselves to his feathers; the last of which being abstracted, he is commonly called a fine fellow, and kicked out of their company. I cannot pretend to say what degree of relish my prototype, the true I. D. Dawkins, may have had for such a mode of existence; but I must aver in my own defence, that I had, throughout the whole adventure, while in his body, so much of Sheppard Lee's original sense of honour and honesty hanging about me, that I was more than once shocked at the meanness and depravity of such a course of life; and when I first understood the thing from Tickle, I was so ashamed of myself, that had I lighted upon the body of any decent man at the moment, I do verily believe I should have done my best to get into it, and so put an end to Mr. I. D.