do not often see in these days, when Servant-maids come up by Coach--my service to them!--and disdain the Wagon, and his Worship the Captain wears a fine laced coat and a cockade in his hat,--who but he!--and travels post. The maid who was bound on a visit to her Grandmother was, I rejoice to admit, most tenderly kind to me. She combed my hair, and wiped away the tears that besmirched my face. When the Wagon halted at the King's Arms, Kensington, she tripped down and brought me a flagon of new milk with some peppermint in it; and she told me stories all the way to Hounslow, and bade me mind my book, and be a good child, and that Angels would love me. Likewise that she was being courted by a Pewterer in Panyer Alley, who had parted a bright sixpence with her--she showed me her token, drawn from her modest bodice, and who had passed his word to Wed, if he had to take to the Road for the price of the Ring--but that was only his funning, she said,--or if she were forced even to run away from her Mistress, and make a Fleet Match of it. It was little, in good sooth, that I knew about courtships or Love-tokens or Fleet Matches; but I believe that a woman, for want of a better gossip, would open her Love-budget to a Baby or a Blind Puppy, and I listened so well that she kissed me ere we parted, and gave me a pocketful of cheese-cakes. It was quite night, and far beyond Hounslow, when I was dozing off into happy sleep again, that the Wagon came to a dead stop, and I awoke in great fright at the sound of a harsh voice asking if the Boy Jack was there. I was the "Boy Jack:" and the Wagoner, coming to the after-part of the tilt with his lantern, pulled me from among the straw with far less ado than if I had been the Tinker's dog. I was set down on the ground before a tall man with a long face and an ugly little scratch wig, who had large boots with straps over his thighs like a Farmer, and swayed about him with a long whip. "Oh, this is the boy, is it?" said the long man. "A rare lump to lick into shape, upon my word." I was too frightened to say aught; but the Wagoner muttered something in the long man's ear, and gave him my bundle and money and the letter; and then I was clapped up on a pillion behind the long man, who had clomb up to the saddle of a vicious horse that went sideways; and he, bidding me hold on tight to his belt, for a mangy young whelp as I was, began jolting me to the dreadful place of Torture and Infernal cruelty which for six intolerable months was to be my home. This man's name was Gnawbit, and he was my Schoolmaster. I was delivered over to him, bound hand and foot, as it were, by those hard-hearted folk (who should have been most tender to me, a desolate orphan) in Hanover Square. His name was Gnawbit, and he lived hard by West Drayton.