I'll not meddle; don't mind me.' To get her brother out of the prison; out of the succession to Mrs Bangham in executing commissions, and out of the slang interchange with very doubtful companions consequent upon both; was her hardest task.

At eighteen he would have dragged on from hand to mouth, from hour to hour, from penny to penny, until eighty.

Nobody got into the prison from whom he derived anything useful or good, and she could find no patron for him but her old friend and godfather.
'Dear Bob,' said she, 'what is to become of poor Tip ?' His name was Edward, and Ted had been transformed into Tip, within the walls.
The turnkey had strong private opinions as to what would become of poor Tip, and had even gone so far with the view of averting their fulfilment, as to sound Tip in reference to the expediency of running away and going to serve his country.

But Tip had thanked him, and said he didn't seem to care for his country.
'Well, my dear,' said the turnkey, 'something ought to be done with him.
Suppose I try and get him into the law ?' 'That would be so good of you, Bob!' The turnkey had now two points to put to the professional gentlemen as they passed in and out.

He put this second one so perseveringly that a stool and twelve shillings a week were at last found for Tip in the office of an attorney in a great National Palladium called the Palace Court; at that time one of a considerable list of everlasting bulwarks to the dignity and safety of Albion, whose places know them no more.
Tip languished in Clifford's Inns for six months, and at the expiration of that term sauntered back one evening with his hands in his pockets, and incidentally observed to his sister that he was not going back again.
'Not going back again ?' said the poor little anxious Child of the Marshalsea, always calculating and planning for Tip, in the front rank of her charges.
'I am so tired of it,' said Tip, 'that I have cut it.' Tip tired of everything.