had the aggravated misery of mourning for a deaf husband, while she was
conscious that the luxuries and almost the necessaries of life were for
ever snatched from herself and her child.

Again I found myself in London, but my beauty was gone, I had lost the
activity of youth, and when slowly I chanced to creak through Long Acre,
Houlditch, my very parent, who was standing at his door sending forth a
new-born Britska, glanced at me scornfully, and knew me not! I passed on
heavily--I thought of former days of triumph, and there was madness in
the thought I became a _crazy_ vehicle! straw was thrust into my inward
parts, I was numbered among the fallen,--yes, I was now a
hackney-chariot, and my number was one hundred!

What tongue can tell the degradations I have endured! The persons who
familiarly have _called_ me, the wretches who have sat in me--never can
this be told. Daily I take my stand in the same vile street, and nightly
am I driven to the minor theatres--to oyster-shops--to desperation!

One day, when empty and unoccupied, I was hailed by two police-officers
who were bearing between them a prisoner. It was the seducer of my
second ill-fated mistress; a first crime had done its usual work, it had
prepared the mind for a second, and a worse: the seducer had done a deed
of deeper guilt, and _I_ bore him one stage towards the gallows. Many
months after, a female called me at midnight: she was decked in tattered
finery, and what with fatigue and recent indulgence in strong liquors,
she was scarcely sensible, but she possessed dim traces of past beauty.
I can say nothing more of her, but that it was the fugitive wife whom I
had borne to Brighton so many years ago. No words of mine could paint
the living warning that I beheld. What had been the sorrows of unmerited
desertion and unkindness supported by conscious rectitude, compared with