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DURING my nightly resorts to the Blue Lion, in Gray's-Inn-Lane, I one evening fell into conversation, at that house, with a young man of decent appearance, a few years older than myself. We were so mutually pleased with each other, that at parting, an appointment to breakfast together the next morning was the consequence, and on this second meeting, our intimacy so far increased, that we began to explain our respective situations in life to each other. My new acquaintance, whose name was D———, informed me that he had lately quitted His Majesty's Ship Montague, of 74 guns, on board of which he had served as Steward to the Commander, Captain Patterson. That having lived freely for some months on shore, he had now spent all his money, and was so much reduced, that he really knew not how to subsist any longer, and concluded with expressing his intention to proceed immediately to Portsmouth, in the hope of obtaining a similar birth to his former one. I assured him that I was, like himself, so much reduced, as to find the utmost difficulty in existing at all, and that if he would permit me to join my