Page:Stubbs's Calendar or The Fatal Boots.djvu/116

100 "A general in a red goat! 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—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 favor 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 placed 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 recognized me. I lived in daily fear the first year; but, afterwards, grew accustomed