This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.

143

For a few weeks we continued to go out[1] with one or other of the gentlemen frequenting the Swan; and after I had made the first essay, I became pretty expert in the art of buzzing. Our success was various, but we managed to live well, and I for my part soon acquired a good stock of clothes, books, and other comforts, as they were considered by me. As for Bromley, he was not so good a manager, and when absent from me, he led a very irregular life, lavishing his money without discrimination on the most unworthy objects, without taking any thought for the morrow, so that though our gains were equal, I became every day richer, while he was seldom master of a guinea beforehand. By degrees we detached ourselves from the society of those veteran prigs[2], with whom we had first associated, and not confining our operations to one branch of depredation, we had recourse to various methods of getting money. It would be tedious to particularise every species of fraud and robbery, which we practised in the short space of three months, at the end of which period, it will be seen that the hand of justice arrested our further progress; and it is hardly credible, (but such is the fact,) that during this our limited career, we exercised alternately the following numerous modes of depredation; which, least the reader should be unprovided

  1. To go a thieving.
  2. Thieves.