Diving amidst these miscellaneous documents and treasures, the prowler's hand rested on some old letters, in clerk- like fair calligraphy, tied round with a dirty string, and on them, in another and fresher writing, a scrap that contained an address,--"Samuel Adolphus Poole, Esq., Alhambra Villa, Regent's Park." "To-morrow, Nix my Dolly; to-morrow," muttered the tatterdemalion; "but to-night,--plague on it, where is the other blackguard's direction? Ah, here!" And he extracted from the thievish scrawls a peculiarly thievish-looking hieroglyph. Now, as he lifts it up to read by the gaslight, survey him well. Do you not know him? Is it possible? What! the brilliant sharper! The ruffian exquisite! Jasper Losely! Can it be? Once before, in the fields of Fawley, we beheld him out at elbows, seedy, shabby, ragged. But then it was the decay of a foppish spendthrift, --clothes distained, ill-assorted, yet, still of fine cloth; shoes in holes, yet still pearl-coloured brodequins. But now it is the decay of no foppish spendthrift: the rags are not of fine cloth; the tattered shoes are not the brodequins. The man has fallen far below the politer grades of knavery, in which the sharper affects the beau. And the countenance, as we last saw it, if it had lost much of its earlier beauty, was still incontestably handsome. What with vigour and health and animal spirits, then on the aspect still lingered light; now from corruption the light itself was gone. In that herculean constitution excess of all kinds had at length forced its ravage, and the ravage was visible in the ruined face. The once sparkling eye was dull and bloodshot. The colours of the cheek, once clear and vivid, to which fiery drink had only sent the blood in a warmer glow, were now of a leaden dulness, relieved but by broken streaks of angry red, like gleams of flame struggling through gathered smoke. The profile, once sharp and delicate like Apollo's, was now confused in its swollen outline; a few years more, and it would be gross as that of Silenus,--the nostrils, distended with incipient carbuncles, which betray the gnawing fang that alcohol fastens into the liver. Evil passions had destroyed the outlines of the once beautiful lips, arched as a Cupid's bow. The sidelong, lowering, villanous expression which had formerly been but occasional was now habitual and heightened. It was the look of the bison before it gores. It is true, however, that even yet on the countenance there lingered the trace of that lavish favour bestowed on it by nature. An artist would still have said, "How handsome that ragamuffin must have been!" And true is it, also, that there was yet that about the bearing of the man which contrasted his squalor, and seemed to say that he had not been born to wear rags and loiter at midnight amongst the haunts of thieves. Nay, I am not sure that you would have been as incredulous now, if told that the wild outlaw before you had some claim by birth or by