Reader,--will you make a clean breast and answer a simple question?--Were you ever regularly cribbed, and deposited for safe keeping in a watch-house? Don’t confound places, and suppose for a moment, that I mean those _réfugia peccatorum_, now-a-days called “station-houses.” The two are no more alike, than the London Tavern is to a boiled-beef shop. If you reply to my inquiry in the negative, and art young, I can only say the mischief is irremediable--and for the best reason, because watch-houses have been defunct these twenty years. If, like myself, you are a gentleman of a certain age, and also plead ignorance--you have nothing left but to mourn over misspent time, and lament a misfortune, for which no one is blamable but yourself. Many a jovial hour have I passed in St. Andrews--I don’t mean the Scotch College so called, but the Dublin watch-house of pleasant memory; and I have also occasionally favoured with a visit other establishments of the same kind, where belated gentlemen were sure to find the door open without having the trouble of knocking twice:--but who, except “upon compulsion,” would enter a modern bastile? The place is in everything an abomination, and so republican wherewithal in its regulations, as to be fitted only for the reception of the _canaille_. There, captains and cabmen are placed upon a par. “Look to him, jailer,” is the only order that is attended to; and whether you belong to swells West-end, or the swell-mob, matters not a brass button. The thing’s similar all through, and you undergo the same process of purification. You are cooped up all night, thermometer in summer 110, in winter down to zero--and bundled before the Beak in the morning all “unkempt” and with “marvellous foul linen.” Of course, you are not flat enough to give your real name. If you are a tradesman, why you wish to “come it genteel,” and pass for the time being as Mr. Ferdinand Fitzsnooks. If, on the contrary, you happen to be a “top-sawyer,” you descend from your “high estate,” and--though “Baron or Squire, or Knight of the Shire,”--adopt “for the nonce,” the simpler appellation of Smith, Brown, or Robinson. Well, in due course, you are favoured with a hearing--the charges are proven, and the Worthy Magistrate--he’s always so termed in the Sunday papers--runs you up a bill as glibly as the waitress of an eating-house. Imprimis, you are scored down five shillings for being drunk--forty ditto, for assault and battery--as much more for jingling some Doctor’s bell--and the tale ends in your five-pound flimsy having got a regular sickener. You fork the money out, and prepare directly to make your exit; but hold, you are not safe yet--wait for the parting admonition. Beaky having first premised that your name is neither Smith, Brown, nor Robinson, is sorry to assure you that he considers you a disgrace to your family and order--and, after a flattering panegyric upon his own nice sense of what is due to