saying, “I am an ill-used man, but I’ll tell it to the world.” Misery had evidently given him a slight craze, as it almost always does when it overtakes a man accustomed in early life to better things. Some time afterwards I saw him a little revivified through the influence of a _new second-hand coat_, and he seemed, from a small leathern parcel which he bore under his arm, to be engaged in some small agency. But this was a mere flash before utter expiration. He relapsed to the Cowgate—to rags—to wretchedness—to madness—immediately after. When I next saw him, it was in that street, the time midnight. He lay in the bottom of a stair, more like a heap of mud than a man. A maniac curse, uttered as I stumbled over him, was the means of my recognising it to be Kier. The system of life pursued by _victims_ in general, is worthy of being inquired into. _Victims_ hang much about taverns in the outskirts of the town. Perhaps a decent man from Pennycuik, with the honest rustic name of Walter Brown, or James Gowans, migrates to the Candlemaker Row, or the Grassmarket, and sets up a small public house. You may know the man by his corduroy spatterdashes, and the latchets of his shoes drawn through them by two pye-holes. He is an honest man, believing every body to be as honest as himself. Perhaps he has some antiquated and prescribed right to the stance of a hay-stack at Pennycuik, and is not without his wishes to try his fortune in the Parliament House. Well, the _victims_ soon scent out his house by the glare of his new sign—the _novitas regni_—and upon him they fall tooth and nail. Partly through simplicity, partly by having his feelings excited regarding the stance of the hay-stack, he gives these gentlemen some credit. For a while you may observe a flocking of _victims_ toward his doorway, like the gathering of clean and unclean things to Noah’s ark. But it is not altogether a case of deception. _Victims_, somehow or other, occasionally _have_ money. True, it is seldom in greater sums than sixpence. But then, consider the importance of sixpence to a flock of _victims_. Such a sum, judiciously managed, may get the whole set meat and drink for a day. At length, when Walter begins to find his barrels run dry, with little return of money wherewithal to replenish them, and when the joint influence of occasional apparitions of sixpence, and the stance of the hay-stack at Pennycuik, has no longer any effect upon him, why, what is to be done but fly to some other individual, equally able and willing to bleed?