The Life and Adventures of Guzman D'Alfarache, or the Spanish Rogue, Volume 2

From the service of the Cook, Guzman returns to the Begging Trade, and robs an Apothecary.

Wisdom is better than riches, since Fortune is but a fickle goddess, who bereaves us one day of what she has bestowed on us the preceding. During the course of our lives she makes us resemble comedians, who have every day new parts to study, and must appear in different characters. Who could have thought that, after having served the cook so faithfully, he would have turned me out of doors for so trifling an offence? It is true, that thus the world wags, and that persons of much greater consequence than myself are constantly treated in the same manner by the great upon the most trivial occasion, after having rendered them a thousand services.

Stop, Guzman, cry you, or you will lose yourself in moral reflections. Whither will this learned discourse lead you? To my basket again, reply I; yes, my friend, to my basket, which, having now become to me as useful as eloquence was to Demosthenes, or stratagems to Ulysses, consoled me under my present misfortune. Long may the basket-trade flourish, which a man, having once tried, will never fail to resume. I must candidly confess that when I returned to it I was much in the same condition as when I was fool enough to leave it; for all the produce of my former knaveries, during the time I had been scullion, had gone as lightly as it came, and, with the exception of a finer suit of clothes, I was no better off than before.