But we mustn't forget Pierce Veogh,--though 'tisn't he is my hero exactly, but Timberleg still I can't go on without him, no more than the man in the book could play on the organ but for the boy that blowed the bellows. Well, Pierce, as I tould you, had the bailiffs about for him and as Timberleg seemed to have taken up his abode by The Beg,--which was Pierce's place, you'll recollect,--why, Pierce thought he couldn't do better than sneak off, if he could, to the town Nick came from, and stay there for a day or two: for Pierce was trying his utmost to raise money, and hoped to receive letters, post after post, to tell him things were settled; and a day's delay was worth everything to him;--to say nothing of the horror he felt, in common with most of us, to being shut up between four walls.--Not that a prison, when you're used to it, is the worst place in the world perhaps; for I know a man that hated the name of it, and after he got into one at last, he liked it so well, that when he could, he wouldn't come out of it, but turned turnkey, and kept his post behind the gate, with the key in his hand, doing nothing but opening and shutting the door, and never stirring out of the place, which had grown a world to him, till death came one day, and removed him to closer confinement within six boards, nailed together,--and that manes a coffin.--Now, a coffin's a thing, allow me to remark, that we all hate the sight of; and yet there's not one in ten thousand of us but hopes to come to it at last;--for who'd like to be buried any way but in a box?--And that's a feeling that's laughable to one who looks two inches below the surface of things; for what is it, but a fear of letting the cold clay come to us for a few years?--And come it will, you know, at last, whether a man's buried in a large 'sheet of paper, a big hollow stone, or a lead coffin. And what matters time to the dead?--Or where's the difference, let me ask, between two minutes and twenty thousand years, to them that's under the turf?--Do what we will, the blackguard worms ates us all up at last; and they that takes pains to preserve their bodies, don't do well, as I think: for, while all that remains of me, after being buried in a dacent and ordinary way, some time hence, becomes a part of the big earth, and can't be distinguished from what it's mixed up with,--the visible and touchable nose of a pickled emperor, a thousand years after he's dead, gets pulled by some puppy that opens his grave, and don't happen to approve of what he did when alive: or, what's worse, the bones of the arm that awed multitudes, gets cut into drunken men's dominos; or the boys and girls of a tenth generation plays with them for sugar-plums, in the shape of two a-penny tetotums, and so forth. Therefore, let me, when I die, have no armour about me; let the worms come, and good luck to them, say I;--the sooner they walk away with every inch of me, the better.