the good company who had been considered guilty of that compendious offence, 'a misdemeanor.' Here a tall gentleman marched up to him, and addressed him in a certain language, which might be called the free-masonry of flash; and which Paul, though he did not comprehend verbatim, rightly understood to be an inquiry whether he was a thorough rogue and an entire rascal. He answered half in confusion, half in anger—and his reply was so detrimental to any favourable influence he might otherwise have exercised over the interrogator,—that the latter personage, giving him a pinch in the ear, shouted out, "Ramp, ramp!" and, at that significant and awful word, Paul found himself surrounded in a trice by a whole host of ingenious tormentors. One pulled this member, another pinched that; one cuffed him before, and another thrashed him behind. By way of interlude to this pleasing occupation, they stripped him of the very few things that in his change of dress he had retained. One carried off his handkerchief, a second his neckcloth, and a third, luckier than either, possessed himself of a pair of cornelian shirt-buttons, given to Paul as a
