"A red coat! I hope you don't think I would demean myself by entering the ranks of the army? I am a gentleman, Mr. Stiffelkind—I can never—no, I never."
"No, I know you will never—you are too great a goward, ha! ha!—though dis is a red goat, and a place where you must give some hard knocks too, ha! ha!—do you gomprehend?—and you shall be a general, instead of a gabtain—ha! ha!"
"A general in a red coat! Mr. Stiffelkind?"
"Yes, a GENERAL BOSTMAN! ha! ha! I have been vid your old friend, Bunting, and he has an uncle in the Post-office, and he has got you de place—eighteen shillings a veek, you rogue, and your goat. You must not oben any of de letters, you know."
And so it was—I, Robert Stubbs, Esquire, became the vile thing he named—a general postman!
I was so disgusted with Stiffelkind's brutal jokes, which were now more brutal than ever, that when I got my place in the Post-office I never went near the fellow again—for though he had done me a favour in keeping me from starvation, he certainly had done it in a very rude, disagreeable manner, and showed a low and mean spirit in shoving me into such a degraded place as that of postman. But what had I to do? I submitted to fate, and for three years or more, Robert Stubbs, of the North-Bungay Fencibles, was——
I wonder nobody recognised me. I lived in daily fear the first year; but, afterwards, grew accustomed to my situation, as all great men will do, and wore my red coat as naturally as if I had been sent into the world only for the purpose of being a letter carrier.
I was first in the Whitechapel district, where I stayed nearly three years, when I was transferred to Jermyn Street and Duke Street—famous places for lodgings. I suppose I left a hundred letters at a house in the latter street, where lived some people who must have recognised me had they but once chanced to look at me.
You see, that when I left Sloffem, and set out in the gay world, my mamma had written to me a dozen times at least, but I never answered her, for I knew she wanted money, and I detest writing. Well, she stopped her letters, finding she could get none from me: but when I was in the Fleet, as I told you, I wrote repeatedly to my dear mamma, and was not a little nettled at her refusing to notice me in my distress, which is the very time one most wants notice.