"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.
Stubbs is not an uncommon name; and though I saw MRS. STUBBS on a little bright brass plate, in Duke Street, and delivered so many letters to the lodgers in her house, I never thought of asking who she was, or whether she was my relation, or not.
One day the young woman who took in the letters had not got change, and she called her mistress;—an old lady in a poke bonnet came out of the parlour, and put on her spectacles, and looked at the letter, and fumbled in her pocket for eight-pence, and apologized to the postman for keeping him waiting; and when I said, "Never mind, ma'am, it's no trouble," the old lady gave a start, and then she pulled off her spectacles, and staggered back; and then she began muttering, as if about to choke; and then she gave a great screech, and flung herself into my arms, and roared out, "MY SON! MY SON!"