mere caput mortuum; to change prime tripe, delicate cow-heel, succulent trotters, for a mouthful of dust; to change a garret for a grave; to change a neckcloth for a halter. Zounds! what a deal of change for a bad half sovereign! Well, there he was, caught like a rat, and going for a tit-bit to the furr’d Law-Cats, and without so much as giving a squeak for his life. The counterfeits were on him, so he had nothing to utter. I verily believe, if you had found him in twice as many melting pots, and crucibles, and dies, and white or brown gravy to boot, he could not have coined an excuse. As I said before, he was found _with the mould upon him_, and that, as the sexton of St. Sepulchre will tell you, is as good as a burial to you any day of your life. He was legally dead, and could not look, like other men, upon the sun as his sun-in-law, so he wisely shook hands with himself, and bade good-bye to himself, and did not attempt with his tongue to lick the cub of guilt into a child of grace. All he asked, was to be allowed to take with him a little reptile, or insect of some sort that he had brought over from Italy, belike to be a solace to his captivity; for Baron Trenck, you know, made a bon-camarade of a prison rat, and Monsieur F., in the Bastile, as you know equally, made a long-standing friend of a daddy-longlegs. We live in a world of whims. We eat them, and drink them, and court them, and marry them, take them to bed and board with us, and why not to prison? So Tonio begged for his whim to keep him company, and as it was a small gentle-looking whim, neither so fierce as a lion, nor so huge as an elephant, and moreover as it was a whim no ways dangerous to Church or State, he was allowed to take it with him in a little box, which he carried in his bosom. Now, if curiosity should itch to know what his whim was like, let it be known, once for all, that it was like neither a toad, nor a spider, nor a viper, nor a snail, nor a black beetle, nor a newt, but something between the size of a crocodile and a cricket. And as for the manner of its going, it either flew, or swam, or hopped, or crawled, or lay still like an oyster, for the Newgate Calendar does not say which. Why it was not a monkey, or a tortoise, or a marmot, Tonio being an Italian, you must ask of the Foreign Secretary at the Court of the King of the Beggars.