“Please your worship, I am a poor man who have lost the use of my limbs these seven years.”
“And how have you been supported all that time?”
“Why, sir, I might have starved long ago, as I have no settlement in these parts, and the masters for whom I worked would do nothing for me, but a very good gentleman has been so kind as to give me five shillings a week for these six years.”
“Ay! you were lucky, indeed, to light upon such a kind gentleman. Pray, what is his name?”
“I don’t know it, your worship.”
“No!—that’s very strange, that you should not know the name of the person who keeps you from starving. But where does he live?”
“Indeed, sir, I don’t know that neither. I know nothing at all of him but the good he does me.”
“Why, how came you at first to be acquainted with him?”
“I had just been turned out of the hospital incurable, and was thinking that nothing remained for me but begging and starving in the streets, when the gentleman came up to my poor lodging (God knows how he found it) and gave me a guinea to buy some necessaries, and told me, if I would do what little I could to maintain myself, he would take care that I should not want. And ever since, either he or his man has brought me a crown every week.”
“This story, my friend, will hardly pass. But tell me what trade you worked at before you lost the use of your limbs?”