 and calamities
of his life. He had brains in abundance, and a somewhat better education would
have made of him either a successful honest man or a rascal of superior scope -
it is always a toss-up between these two results where a character such as his
is in question. Ever since he abandoned the craft to which his father had had
him trained, he had lived on his wits; there would be matter for a volume in the
history of his experiences at home and abroad, a volume infinitely more valuable
considered as a treatise on modern civilisation than any professed work on that
subject in existence. With one episode only in his past can we here concern
ourselves; the retrospect is needful to make clear his relations with Mr.
Scawthorne.
    On his return from America, Joseph possessed a matter of a hundred pounds;
the money was not quite legally earned (pray let us reserve the word honesty for
a truer use than the common one), and on the whole he preferred to recommence
life in the old country under a pseudonym - that little affair of the desertion
of his child would perhaps, in any case, have made this advisable. A hundred
pounds will not go very far, but Joseph took care to be well dressed, and
allowed it to be surmised by those with whom he came in contact that the
resources at his command were considerable. In early days, as we know, he had
worked at electroplating, and the natural bent of his intellect was towards
mechanical and physical science; by dint of experimenting at his old pursuit, he
persuaded himself, or at all events attained plausibility for the persuading of
others, that he had discovered a new and valuable method of plating with nickel.
He gave it out that he was in search of a partner to join him in putting this
method into practice. Gentlemen thus situated naturally avail themselves of the
advertisement columns of the newspaper, and Joseph by this means had the
happiness to form an acquaintance with one Mr. Polkenhorne, who, like himself,
had sundry schemes for obtaining money without toiling for it in the usual
vulgar way. Polkenhorne was a man of thirty-five, much of a blackguard, but
keen-witted, handsome, and tolerably educated; the son of a Clerkenwell
clockmaker, he had run through an inheritance of a few thousand pounds, and made
no secret of his history - spoke of his experiences, indeed, with a certain
pride. Between these two a close intimacy sprang up, one of those partnerships,
beginning with mutual deception, which are so common in the border-land of
enterprise just
