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CHAPTER VI.

Visit Mr. Bilger, an eminent Jeweller.—His Politeness, and the Return I made for it.—Perfidy of a Pawnbroker.—Obliged to decamp with Precipitation.

THE next adventure I shall have occasion to relate, more fully confirms the justice of the remark, that the connexions formed by persons during temporary confinement in a jail, commonly lead to further acts of wickedness, and frequently entail on the parties a more severe punishment than that which they have just escaped. This was exactly my unhappy case and I now come to the most fatal era of my eventful life.

In the same ward with myself were confined two brothers, very genteel young men, who had been recently cast for death for privately stealing some valuable rings, &c., from the shop of a Jeweller in Leadenhall-street. As a conformity of character, or similarity of pursuits, is the strongest source of friendship, so these persons and myself had become very intimately acquainted. In the course of our frequent conversations on the subject with which we were all three alike most conversant, the brothers informed me that they had, like myself, made a suc-