But the "hour" again overflowed me. I was walking it off in Regent
Street, when an old fellow-victim met me, and prescribed a trot to
Newmarket. The prescription was taken, and the hour was certainly got
rid of. But the remedy was costly; for my betting-book left me minus ten
thousand pounds. I returned to town like a patient from a
watering-place; relieved of every thing but the disease that took me
there. My last shilling remained among the noble blacklegs; but nothing
could rob me of a fragment of my superfluous time, and I brought even a
tenfold allowance of it back. But every disease has a crisis; and when a
lounge through the streets became at once useless and inconvenient--when
the novelty of being cut by all my noble friends, and of being seduously
followed by that generation who, unlike the fickle world, reserve their
tipstaff attentions for the day of adversity, had lost its zest, and I
was thinking whether time was to be better fought off by a plunge to the
bottom of the Thames, or by the muzzle of one of Manton's hair-
triggers--I was saved by a plunge into the King's Bench.
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