In the third place, a young man of this description could not, when seeking for a wife, feel the slightest inclination to have a living catalogue of his immoralities enumerated to her, under the names of Tom, or Dick, or Val so and so, all his children.

This, of course, was an involuntary respect paid to modesty, and perhaps the strongest argument for suppressing the true name.

The practice, however, was by no means universal; but in frequent instances it existed, and Val the Vulture's was one of them.

He was named after neither father or mother, but after his grandmother, by the gaoler's side.

Deaker would not suffer his name to be assumed; and so far as his mother was concerned, the general tenor of her life rendered the reminiscence of her's anything but creditable to her offspring.