 8 Scenes Chapter 1 The Streets, Morning The appearance presented by the streets of London an hour before sunrise on a summer's morning is most striking even to the few whose unfortunate pursuits of pleasure, or scarcely less unfortunate pursuits of business, cause them to be well acquainted with the scene. There is an air of cold solitary desolation about the noiseless streets which we are accustomed to see thronged at other times by a busy, eager crowd, and over the quiet, closely shut buildings which throughout the day are swarming with life and bustle that is very impressive. The last drunken man, who shall fight his way home before sunlight, has just staggered heavily along, roaring out the burden of the drinking song of the previous night. The last houseless vagrant whom penury and police have left in the streets has coiled up his chilly limbs in some paved corner to dream of food and warmth. The drunken, the dissipated, and the wretched have disappeared. The more sober and orderly part of the population have not yet awakened to the labours of the day, and the stillness of death is over the streets. Its very hue seems to be imparted to them, cold and lifeless as they look in the grey, somber light of daybreak. The coach stands in the larger Thorophares are deserted, the night-houses are closed, and the chosen promenades of profligate misery are empty. An occasional policeman may alone be seen at the street-corner, listlessly gazing on the deserted prospect before him, and now and then a rakish-looking cat runs stealthily across the road and descends his own area with as much caution and slinus, bounding first on the water-butt, then on the dust-hole, and then alighting on the flag-stones, as if he were conscious that his character depended on his gallantry of the preceding night escaping public observation. A partially opened bedroom-window here and there bespeaks the heat of the weather, and the uneasy slumbers of its occupant, and the dim scanty flicker of the rush-light through the window-blind denotes the chamber of watching or sickness. With these few exceptions the streets present no signs of life nor the houses of habitation. An hour wears away. The spires of the churches and roofs of the principal buildings are faintly tinged with the light of the rising sun, and the streets by almost imperceptible degrees begin to resume their bustle and animation. Market carts roll slowly along, the sleepy wagoner impatiently urging on his tired horses or vainly endeavouring to awaken the boy who luxuriously stretched on the top of the fruit-baskets forgets in happy oblivion his long cherished curiosity to behold the wonders of London. Rough sleepy-looking animals of strange appearance, something between oslars and hackney-coachmen, begin to take down the shutters of early public houses and little deal-tables, with the ordinary preparations for a street breakfast make their appearance at the customary stations. Hours of men and women, principally the latter, carrying upon their heads heavy baskets of fruit, toil down the parkside of Piccadilly on their way to Covent Garden, and following each other in rapid succession form a long, straggling line from thence to the turn of the road at Night's Bridge. Here in their abrick-layers' labourer, with the day's dinner tied up in a handkerchief, knocks briskly to his work, and occasionally a little knot of three or four school-boys on a stolen bathing-exposition rattle merely over the pavement, their boisterous mirth contrasting forcibly with the demeanour of the little sweep, who, having knocked and rung till his arm aches, and being interdicted by a merciful legislature from endangering his lungs by calling out, sits patiently down on the doorstep until the housemaid may happen to awake. Covent Garden market and the avenues leading to it are thronged with carts of all sorts sizes and descriptions, from the heavy lumbering wagon with its four stout horses to the jingling costar-monger's cart with its consumptive donkey. The pavement is already strewed with decaying cabbage-leaves, broken hay-bands, and all the indescribable litter of a vegetable market, men are shouting carts, backing, horses, singing, boys fighting, basket women talking, piemen expatiating on the excellence of their pastry and donkeys braying. These and a hundred other sounds form a compound discordant enough to a Londoner's ears and remarkably disagreeable to those of country gentlemen who are sleeping at the hummums for the first time. Another hour passes away, and the day begins in Good Ernest. The servant of all work who, under the plea of sleeping very soundly, has utterly disregarded Mrs's ringing for half an hour previously, is warned by a master, whom Mrs has sent up in his drapery to the landing-place for that purpose, that it's half-past six, when upon she awakens, all of a sudden, with well-famed astonishment, and goes downstairs very silkily, wishing, while she strikes a light, that the principle of spontaneous combustion would extend itself to coals and kitchen-range. When the fire is lighted, she opens the street-door to take in the milk. When, by the most singular co-incidence in the world, she discovers that the servant next door has just taken in her milk, too, and that Mr. Todd's young man over the way is, by an equally extraordinary chance, taking down his master's shutters. The inevitable consequence is that she just steps, milk-jug in hand, as far as next door, just to say, good morning to Betsy Clark, and that Mr. Todd's young man just steps over the way to say good morning to both of them, and as the aforesaid Mr. Todd's young man is almost as good-looking and fascinating as the baker himself, the conversation quickly becomes very interesting, and probably would become more so if Betsy Clark's misses, who always will be a follow-and-heard-about, didn't give an angry tap at her bedroom window, on which Mr. Todd's young man tries to whistle coolly as he goes back to his shop much faster than he came from it, and the two girls run back to their respective places, and shut their street-doors with surprising softness, each of them poking their heads out of the front parlor window a minute afterwards, however ostensibly with the view of looking at the male which just then passes by. But really, for the purpose of catching another glimpse of Mr. Todd's young man, who being fond of males but more of females, takes a short look at the males and a long look at the girls, much to the satisfaction of all parties concerned. The male itself goes on to the coach-office in due course, and the passengers who are going out by the early coach stare with astonishment at the passengers who are coming in by the early coach, who look blue and dismal, and are evidently under the influence of that odd feeling produced by travelling, which makes the events of yesterday morning seem as if they had happened at least six months ago, and induces people to wonder with considerable gravity whether the friends and relations they took leave of a fortnight before have altered much since they have left them. The coach-office is all alive, and the coaches which are just going out are surrounded by the usual crowd of Jews and nondescripts who seem to consider, heaven knows why, that it is quite impossible any man can mount a coach without requiring at least six penny worth of oranges, a pen-knife, a pocket-book, a last year's annual, a pencil-case, a piece of sponge, and a small series of caricatures. Half an hour more, and the sun darts his bright rays cheerfully down the still half-empty streets, and shines with sufficient force to rouse the dismal laziness of the apprentice, who pauses every other minute from his task of sweeping out the shop and watering the pavement in front of it to tell another apprentice similarly employed how hot it will be today, or to stand with his right hand shading his eyes, and his left resting on the broom, gazing at the wonder, or the tally-ho, or the nimrod, or some other fast-coach, till it is out of sight, when he re-enters the shop envying the passengers on the outside of the fast-coach, and thinking of the old red brick-house down in the country where he went to school, the miseries of the milk and water, and thick bread and scrapings fading into nothing before the pleasant recollection of the green field the boys used to play in, and the green pond he was caned for presuming to fall into, and other school-boy associations. Cabs with trunks and band-boxes between the driver's legs and outside the apron rattle briskly up and down the streets on their way to the coach-opposes, or steam-packet-warves, and the cab-drivers and hackney-coachmen who are on the stand polish up the ornamental part of the dingy vehicles, the former wondering how people can prefer them wild-beast carowans or homelabuses to a regular cab with a fast trotter, and the latter admiring how people can trust their necks into one of them crazy cabs where they can have a respectable acne-coach with a pair of horses as vote runaway with no one. A consolation unquestionably found that, in fact, seeing that a hackney-coach horse never was known to run at all except as the smart cabman in front of the rank-observes except one, and he ran backwards. The shops are now completely opened, and apprentices and shopmen are busily engaged in cleaning and decking the windows for the day. The baker-shops in town are filled with servants and children waiting for the drawing of the first batch of rolls, an operation which was performed a full hour ago in the suburbs, for the early-clock population of summers in Camden towns, Islington and Pentonville, are fast pouring into the city, or directing their steps towards Chanthory Lane and Inns of Court. Middle-aged men whose salaries have by no means increased in the same proportion as their families, plod steadily along, apparently with no object in view but the counting-house, knowing by sight almost everybody they meet or overtake, where they have seen them every morning, Sunday accepted, during the last twenty years, but speaking to no one. If they do happen to overtake a personal acquaintance, they just exchanged a hurried salutation and keep walking on either by his sigh or in front of him as his rate of walking made chance to be. As to stopping to shake hands or to take the friend's arm, they seem to think as it is not included in their salary they have no right to do it. Small office-lads in large hats, who are made men before they are boys, hurry along in pairs with their first coat carefully brushed and the white trousers of last Sunday plentifully besmeared with dust and ink. It evidently requires a considerable mental struggle to avoid investing part of the day's dinner money in the purchase of the stale tarts so temptingly exposed in dusty tins at the pastry-cook's doors, but a consciousness of their own importance and the receipt of seven shillings a week, with the prospect of an early rise to eight, comes to their aid, and they accordingly put their hats a little more on one side and look under the bonnets of all the milleners and stay-makers of apprentices they meet. Poor girls! The hardest worked, the worst paid, and too often the worst-used class of the community. Eleven o'clock, and a new set of people fill the streets. The goods in the shop windows are invitingly arranged. The shopmen in their white neckerchiefs and spruce coats look as if they couldn't clean a window if their lives depended on it. The carts have disappeared from Covent Garden, the wagoners have returned, and the costar-mongers repair to their ordinary beats in the suburbs. Clerks are at their offices, and gigs, cabs, omnibuses, and saddle-horses are conveying their masters to the same destination. The streets are thronged with a vast concourse of people, gay and shabby, rich and poor, idle and industrious, and we come to the heat, bustle, and activity of noon. End of Section 8. SCETCHES BY BOSS, SECTION IX. SCETCHES BY BOSS, BY CHARLES DICKENS, SECTION IX. SCENES, CHAPTER II. THE STREETS, NIGHT. But the streets of London, to be beheld in the very height of their glory, should be seen on a dark, dull, murky winter's night, when there is just enough damp, gently stealing down to make the pavement greasy without cleansing it of any of its impurities, and when the heavy, lazy mist which hangs over every object makes the gas lamps look brighter and the brilliantly lighted shops more splendid from the contrast they present to the darkness around. All the people who are at home on such a night as this seem disposed to make themselves as snug and comfortable as possible, and the passengers in the streets have excellent reason to envy the fortunate individuals who are seated by their own firesides. In the larger and better kind of streets, dining-parlor curtains are closely drawn, kitchen fires blaze brightly up, and savoury steams of hot dinners salute the nostrils of the hungry wayfarer as he plods warily by the area railings. In the suburbs the muffin-boy rings his way down the little street much more slowly than he is wont to do, for Mrs. Macklin, of number four, has no sooner opened her little street door and screamed out, Muffins, with all her might, than Mrs. Walker, at number five, puts her head out of the parlor window and screams Muffins, too. And Mrs. Walker has scarcely got the words out of her lips than Mrs. Peplow over the way, let's loose master Peplow, who darts down the street with a velocity which nothing but buttered muffins in perspective could possibly inspire, and drags the boy back by main force, whereupon Mrs. Macklin and Mrs. Walker, just to save the boy trouble, and to say a few neighborly words to Mrs. Peplow at the same time, run over the way and buy their muffins at Mrs. Peplow's door, when it appears, from the voluntary statement of Mrs. Walker, that her kittles just to biling, and the cups and saucers ready laid. And that, as it was such a wretched night out of doors, she'd made up her mind to have a nice hot, comfortable cup of tea, a determination at which, by the most singular coincidence, the other two ladies had simultaneously arrived. After a little conversation about the wretchedness of the weather, and the merits of tea, with a digression relative to the viciousness of boys as a rule, and the amiability of master Peplow as an exception, Mrs. Walker sees her husband coming down the street, and as he must want his tea, poor man, after his dirty walk from the docks, she instantly runs across muffins in hand, and Mrs. Macklin does the same, and after a few words to Mrs. Walker, they all pop into their little houses and slam their little street doors, which are not open to gain for the remainder of the evening except to the nine o'clock beer, who comes round with a lantern in front of his tray, and says, as he lends Mrs. Walker's yesterday's tizer, that he's blessed if he can hardly hold the pot, much less feel the paper, for it's one of the bitterest nights he ever felt except the night when the man was frozen to death in the brick field. After a little prophetic conversation with the policeman at the street corner, touching a probable change in the weather, and the setting in of a hard frost, the nine o'clock beer returns to his master's house, and employs himself for the remainder of the evening, in assiduously stirring the tap-room fire, and deferentially taking part in the conversation of the worthy's assembled round it. The streets in the vicinity of the Marsh Gate and Victoria Theatre present an appearance of dirt and discomfort on such a night, which the groups who lounge about them in no degree tend to diminish. Even the little block-tin temples, sacred to baked potatoes, surmounted by a splendid design in variegated lamps, looks less gay than usual, and as to the kidney-pie stand its glory has quite departed. The candle in the transparent lamp manufactured of oil-paper embellished with characters has been blown out fifty times so the kidney-pie merchant, tired with running backwards and forwards to the next wine-volts to get a light, has given up the idea of illumination in despair, and the only signs of his whereabouts are the bright sparks of which a long, irregular train is whirled down the street every time he opens his portable oven to hand a hot kidney-pie to a customer. Flatfish, oyster, and fruit-vendors linger hopelessly in the kennel, in vain endeavouring to attract customers, and the ragged boys who usually desport themselves about the streets stand crouched in little knots in some projecting doorway, or under the canvas-blind of its cheese-mongers, where great flaring gas-lights unshaded by any glass display huge piles of blight red-and-pale yellow cheeses, mingled with little five-pinny dabs of dingy bacon, various tubs of weekly dorset, and cloudy rolls of best fresh. Here they amuse themselves with theatrical converse, arising out of their last half-price visit to the Victoria Gallery, admire the terrific combat, which is nightly encored, and expatiate on the inimitable matter in which Bill Thompson can come the double-monkey or go through the mysterious involutions of a Sader's horn-pipe. It is nearly eleven o'clock, and the cold, thin rain which has been drizzling so long is beginning to pour down in good earnest. The baked potato-man has departed. The kidney-pie-man has just walked away with his warehouse on his arm. The cheese-monger has drawn in his blind, and the boys have dispersed. The constant clicking of patterns on the slippy and uneven pavement, and the rustling of umbrellas, as the wind blows against the sharp windows, bear testimony to the inclemacy of the night, and the policeman with his oil-skin cape buttoned closely round him, seems as he holds his hat on his head, and turns round to avoid the gust of wind and rain which drives against him at the street-corner, to be very far from congratulating himself on the prospect before him. The little chandler's shop, with the cracked bell behind the door, whose melancholy tinkling has been regulated by the demand for quarters of sugar and half ounces of coffee, is shutting up. The crowds which have been passing to and fro during the whole day are rapidly dwindling away, and the noise of shouting and quarreling which issues from the public-houses is almost the only sound that breaks the melancholy stillness of the night. There was another, but it has ceased, that wretched woman with the infant in her arms, round whose meager form the remnant of her own scanty shawl is carefully wrapped, has been attempting to sing some popular ballad on the hope of ringing a few pence from the compassionate passer-by. A brutal laugh at her weak voice is all she has gained. The tears fall thick and fast down her own pale face. The child is cold and hungry, and its low, half-stifled wailing adds to the misery of its wretched mother as she moans aloud and sinks despairingly down on a cold, damp doorstep. How a few of those who pass such a miserable creature is this. Think of the anguish of heart, the sinking of soul and spirit which the very effort of singing produces. Bitter mockery, disease, neglect, and starvation, faintly articulating the words of the joyous ditty that has enlivened your hours of feasting and merriment, God knows how often. It is no subject of jeering. The weak, tremulous voice tells a fearful tale of want and famishing, and the feeble singer of this roaring song may turn away only to die of cold and hunger. One o'clock. Parties returning from the different theatres footed through the muddy streets, cabs, hackney couches, carriages, and theatre omnibuses roll swiftly by, watermen with dim, dirty lanterns on their hands, and large brass plates upon their breasts, who have been shouting and rushing about for the last two hours, retired to their watering-houses to solace themselves with the creature comforts of pipes and pearl. The half-price pit-and-box frequenters of the theatres throng to the different houses of refreshment, and shops, kidneys, rabbits, oysters, stout, cigars, and goes innumerable are served up amidst a noise and confusion of smoking, running, knife-clattering, and waiter-chattering perfectly indescribable. The more musical portion of the playgoing community but take themselves to some harmonic meeting. As a matter of curiosity, let us follow them thither for a few moments. In a lofty room of spacious dimensions are seated some eighty or a hundred guests knocking little pewter-measures on the tables, and hammering away with the handles of their knives as if they were so many trunk-makers. They are applauding a glee which has just been executed by the three professional gentlemen at the top of the centre-table, one of whom is in the chair, the little pompous man with the bald head just emerging from the collar of his green coat. The others are seated on either side of him, the stout man with the small voice, and the thin-faced dark man in black. The little man in the chair is a most amusing personage, such condescending grandeur and such a voice. Base, as the young gentleman near us with the blue stock forcibly remarks to his companion, base, I believe you, he can go down lower than any man, so low sometimes that you can't hear him, and so he does. To hear him growling away gradually lower and lower down, till he can't get back again, is the most delightful thing in the world, and it is quite impossible to witness unmoved the impressive salinity with which he pours forth his soul in my arts in the islands, or the brave old hoke. The stout man is also addicted to sentimentality, and warbles fly, fly from the world my besie with me, or some such song, with lady-like sweetness, and in the most seductive tones imaginable. Pray give your orders, gentlemen, pray give your orders, says the pale-faced man with the red head, and demands for goes of gin and goes of brandy, and pints of stout and cigars of peculiar mildness are vociferously made from all parts of the room. The professional gentlemen are in the very height of their glory, and bestow condescending nods, or even a word or two of recognition on the better-known frequenters of the room, in the most bland and patronising manner possible. The little round-faced man with the small-brown surtoot white stockings and shoes is in the comic line. The mixed air of self-denial and mental consciousness of his own powers, with which he acknowledges the call of the chair, is particularly gratifying. Gentlemen, says the little pompous man, accompanying the word with a knock of the president's hammer on the table, gentlemen, allow me to claim your attention. Our friend, Mr. Smuggins, will oblige. Bravo, shout the company! And Smuggins, after a considerable quantity of coughing by way of symphony, and a most facetious sniff or two, which affords general delight, sings a comic song with a fowl-de-ralle toll-de-ralle chorus at the end of every verse much longer than the verse itself. It is received with unbounded applause, and after some aspiring genius has volunteered a recitation, and failed dismally therein. The little pompous man gives another knock, and says, gentlemen, we will attempt a glee, if you please. This announcement calls forth to multi-less applause, and the more energetic spirits express the unqualified approbation that affords them by knocking one or two stout glasses off their legs, a humorous device, but one which frequently occasions some slight altercation when the form of paying the damage is proposed to be gone through by the waiter. Scenes like these are continued until three or four o'clock in the morning, and even when they close, fresh ones open to the inquisitive novice. But as a description of all of them, however slight would require a volume, the contents of which, however instructive, would be by no means pleasing, we make our bow and drop the curtain. CHAPTER III. What inexhaustible food for speculation do the streets of London afford? We never were able to agree with Sturne in pitying the man who could travel from Dan to Bersheba and say that all was barren. We have not the slightest commissuration for the man who can take up his hat and stick, and walk from Covent Garden to St. Paul's Churchyard and back into the bargain without deriving some amusement. We had almost said instruction from his perambulation. And yet there are such beings we meet them every day. Large black stalks and light waistcoats, jet canes, and discontented countenances are the characteristics of the race. Other people brush quickly by you, steadily plodding on to business or chairfully running after pleasure. These men linger listlessly past, looking as happy and animated as a policeman on duty. Nothing seems to make an impression on their minds. Nothing short of being knocked down by a porter or run over by a cab will disturb their equanimity. You will meet them on a fine day in any of the leading thoroughfares, peep through the window of a Westin cigar shop in the evening if you can manage to get a glimpse between the blue curtains which intercept the vulgar gaze, and you see them in their only enjoyment of existence. There they are, lounging about on round tubs and pipe-boxes in all the dignity of whiskers and gilt watch-guards, whispering soft nothings to the young lady in amber with the large earrings, who, as she sits behind the counter in a blaze of adoration and gas-light, is the admiration of all the female servants in the neighborhood and the envy of every milliner's apprentice within two miles round. One of our principal amusements is to watch the gradual progress, the rise or fall of particular shops. We have formed an intimate acquaintance with several in different parts of town, and are perfectly acquainted with their whole history. We could name, offhand, twenty at least, which we are quite sure have paid no taxes for the last six years. They are never inhabited for more than two months consecutively, and we verily believe have witnessed every retail trade in the directory. There is one whose history is a sample of the rest, in whose fate we have taken a special interest, having had the pleasure of knowing it ever since it has been a shop. It is on the Surrey side of the water, a little distance beyond the Marshgate. It was originally a substantial, good-looking private house enough. The landlord got into difficulties, the hosts got into chancery, the tenant went away, and the house went to ruin. At this period our acquaintance with it commenced. The paint was all worn off, the windows were broken, the area was green with neglect and the overflowing of the water-butt. The butt itself was without a lid, and the street door was the very picture of misery. The chief pastime of the children in the vicinity had been to assemble in a body on the steps, and to take it in turn to knock loud double knocks at the door to the great satisfaction of the neighbors generally, and especially of the nervous old lady next door but one. Numerous complaints were made, and several small basins of water discharged over the offenders but without effect. In this state of things the marine store-dealer at the corner of the street in the most obliging manner took the knocker off and sold it, and the unfortunate house looked more wretched than ever. We deserted our friends for a few weeks. What was our surprise on our return to find no trace of its existence? In its place was a handsome shop, fast approaching to a state of completion, and on the shutters were large bills informing the public that it would shortly be opened with an extensive stalk of linen drapery and haberdashery. It opened in due course. There was the name of the proprietor and co-in guilt-letters almost too dazzling to look at. Such ribbons and shawls, and two such elegant young men behind the counter, each in a clean collar and white neck cloth like the lover in a farce. As to the proprietor he did nothing but walk up and down the shop and hand seats to the ladies and hold important conversations with the handsomest of the young men who was shrewdly suspected by the neighbors to be the co. We saw all this with sorrow. We felt a fatal presentment that the shop was doomed, and so it was. Its decay was slow but sure. Tickets gradually appeared in the windows, then rolls of flannel with labels on them were stuck outside the door, then a bill was pasted on the street door, intimating that the first floor was to be left unfurnished. Then one of the young men disappeared altogether, and the other took to a black neckerchief, and the proprietor took to drinking. The shop became dirty, broken panes of glass remain unmended, and the stalk disappeared piecemeal. At last the company's man came to cut off the water, and then the linen draper cut off himself, leaving the landlord his compliments and the key. The next occupant was a fancy stationer. The shop was more modestly painted than before. Still it was neat, but somehow we always thought as we passed that it looked like a poor and struggling concern. We wished the man well but we trembled for his success. He was a widower evidently, and had employment elsewhere for he passed us every morning on his road to the city. The business was carried on by his eldest daughter, poor girl, she needed no assistance. We occasionally caught a glimpse of two or three children in mourning like herself, as they sat in the little parlor behind the shop, and we never passed a night without seeing the eldest girl at work, either for them or in making some elegant little trifle for sale. We often thought, as her pale face looked more sad and pensive in the dim candle-light, that if those thoughtless females who interfere with the miserable market of poor creatures such as these knew but one half of the misery they suffer, and the bitter privations they endure in their honourable attempts to earn a scanty subsistence, they would perhaps resign even opportunities for the gratification of vanity and an immodest love of self-display rather than drive them to a last dreadful resource, which it would shock the delicate feelings of these charitable ladies to hear named. But we are forgetting the shop. Well, we continue to watch it, and every day show too clearly the increasing poverty of its inmates. The children were clean, it is true, but their clothes were threadbare and shabby. No tenet had been procured for the upper part of the house, from the letting of which a portion of the means of paying the rent was to have been derived, and a slow wasting consumption prevented the eldest girl from continuing her exertions. Quarter-day arrived. The landlord had suffered from the extravagance of his last tenet, and he had no compassion for the struggles of his successor. He put in an execution. As we passed one morning the broker's men were removing the little furniture there was in the house, and a newly posted bill informed us it was a gain to let. What became of the last tenet we never could learn. We believed the girl is past all suffering, and beyond all sorrow, God help her, we hope she is. We were somewhat curious to ascertain what would be the next stage, for that the place had no chance of succeeding now was perfectly clear. The bill was soon taken down, and some alterations were made in the interior of the shop. We were in favour of expectation. We exhausted conjecture. We imagined all the possible trades, none of which were perfectly reconcilable with our idea of the gradual decay of the tenet. It opened, and we wondered why we had not guessed at the real state of the case before. The shop, not a large one at the best of times, had been converted into two. One was a bonnet shape-makers, the other was opened by a tobacconist, who also dealt in walking sticks and Sunday newspapers. The two were separated by a thin partition covered with tawdry striped paper. The tobacconist remained in possession longer than any tenet within a recollection. He was a red-faced, impudent, good-for-nothing dog evidently accustomed to take things as they came and to make the best of a bad job. He sold as many cigars as he could and smoked the rest. He occupied the shop as long as he could make peace with the landlord, and when he could no longer live in quiet he very coolly locked the door and bolted himself. From this period the two little dens have undergone innumerable changes. The tobacconist was succeeded by a theatrical hairdresser who ornamented the window with a great variety of characters and terrific combats. The bonnet-shape-maker gave place to a greengrocer, and the histronic barber was succeeded in his turn by a tailor. So numerous have been the changes that we have have late done little more than mark the peculiar but certain indications of a house being poorly inhabited. It has been progressing by almost imperceptible degrees. The occupiers of the shops have gradually given up room after room, until they have only reserved the little parlour for themselves. First there appeared a brass plate on the private door, with ladies' school legibly engraved thereon. Shortly afterwards we observed a second brass plate, then a bell, and then another bell. When we paused in front of our old friend and observed these signs of poverty, which are not to be mistaken, we thought as we turned away that the house had attained the lowest pitch of degradation. We were wrong. When we last passed it, a dairy was established in the area, and a party of melancholy-looking fowls were amusing themselves by running in at the front door and out at the back one. CHAPTER IV Scotland Yard Scotland Yard is a small, a very small tract of land, bounded on one side by the river Thames, on the other by the gardens of Northumberland House, a butting at one end on the bottom of Northumberland Street, at the other on the back of Whitehall Place. When this territory was first accidentally discovered by a country gentleman who lost his way on the Strand some years ago, the original settlers were found to be a tailor, a publican, two eating-housekeepers, and a fruit-pie maker, and it was also found to contain a race of strong and bulky men who repaired to the wharfs in Scotland Yard regularly every morning about five or six o'clock to fill heavy wagons with coal, with which they proceeded to distant places up the country and supplied the inhabitants with fuel. When they had emptied their wagons they again returned for a fresh supply, and this trade was continued throughout the year. As the settlers derived their subsistence from ministering to the wants of these primitive traders, the articles exposed for sale and the places where they were sold bore strong ogre marks of being expressly adapted to their tastes and wishes. The tailor displayed in his window a lilypution pair of leather-gaters and a diminutive round frock, while each doorpost was appropriately garnished with a model of a coal sack. The two eating-housekeepers exhibited joints of a magnitude and puddings of a solidity, which coal-heavers alone could appreciate, and the fruit-pie maker displayed on his well-scrubbed window-board large white compositions of flour and dripping ornamented with pink stains giving rich promise of the fruit within which made their huge mouths water as they lingered past. But the choicest spot in all Scotland Yard was the old public house in the corner, here in a dark, wainscotted room of ancient appearance cheered by the glow of a mighty fire, and decorated with an enormous clock whereof the face was white and the figures black sat the lusty coal-heavers quaffing large drafts of Berkeley's best and puffing forth volumes of smoke which wreathe heavily above their heads and devolved the room on a thick, dark cloud. From this apartment might their voices be heard on a winter's night penetrating to the very bank of the river as they shouted out some sturdy chorus or roared forth the burden of a popular song dwelling upon the last few words with a strength and length of emphasis which made the very roof tremble above them. Here, too, would they tell old legends of what the Thames was in ancient times when the patent shop manufacturing wasn't built and the Waterloo Bridge had never been thought of, and then they would shake their heads with portentous looks to the deep edification of the rising generation of heavers who crowded round them and wondered where all this would end, where at the tailor would take his pipe solemnly from his mouth and say how that he hoped it might end well, but he very much doubted whether it would or not and couldn't rightly tell what to make of it. A mysterious expression of opinion delivered with a semi-prophetic air which never failed to elicit the fullest concurrence of the assembled company, and so they would go on drinking and wondering till ten o'clock came and with it the tailor's wife to fetch him home when the little party broke up to meet again in the same room and say and do precisely the same things on the following evening at the same hour. About this time the bargers that came up the river began to bring vague rumors of Scotland-yard as somebody in the city having been heard to say that the Lord Mayor had threatened in so many words to pull down the old London Bridge and build up a new one. At first these rumors were disregarded as idle tales, wholly destitute of foundation, for nobody in Scotland-yard doubted that if the Lord Mayor contemplated any such dark design he would just be clapped up in the tower for a week or two and then killed off for high treason. By degrees, however, the reports grew stronger and more frequent and at last a barge, laden with numerous childrens of the best walls and brought up the positive intelligence that several of the archers of the old bridge were stopped and that preparations were actually in progress for constructing the new one. What an excitement was visible in the old tap room on that memorable night. Each man looked into his neighbour's face pale with alarm and astonishment and read therein an echo of the sentiments which filled his own breast. The oldest heaver present proved to demonstration that the moment the piers were removed all the water in the Thames would run clean off and leave a dry gully in its place. What was to become of the coal barges, of the trade of Scotland-yard, of the very existence of its population? The tailor shook his head more sagely than usual and grimly pointing to a knife on the table, bid them wait and see what happened. He said nothing, not he, but if the Lord Mayor didn't fall a victim to popular indignation, why he would be rather astonished, that was all. They did wait, barge after barge arrived, and still no tidings of the assassination of the Lord Mayor. The first stone was laid. It was done by a duke, the King's brother. Years passed away and the bridge was opened by the King himself. In course of time the piers were removed and when the people in Scotland-yard got up next morning in the competent expectation of being able to step over to Peddler's acre without wetting the soles of their shoes they found through their unspeakable astonishment that the water was just where it used to be. A result so different from that which they had anticipated from this first improvement produced its full effect upon the inhabitants of Scotland-yard. One of the eating-house keepers began to court public opinion and to look for customers among a new class of people. He covered his little dining-tables with white cloths and got a painter's apprentice to inscribe something about hot joints from twelve to two in one of the little panes of his shop window. Improvement began to march with rapid stride to the very threshold of Scotland-yard. A new market sprung up at Hungerford and the police commissioners established their office in Whitehall Place. The traffic in Scotland-yard increased, fresh members were added to the House of Commons. The metropolitan representatives found it a near cut and many other foot passengers followed their example. We marked the advance of civilisation and beheld it with a sigh. The eating- housekeeper, who manfully resisted the innovation of table-claws, was losing ground every day as his opponent gained it and a deadly feud sprung up between them. The genteel one no longer took his evening's pint in Scotland-yard, but drank gin and water at a parlor in Parliament Street. The fruit-pie-maker still continued to visit the old room, but he took the smoking cigars and began to call himself a pastry-cook and read the papers. The old heavers still assembled round the ancient fireplace, but their talk was mournful, and the loud song and the joyous shout were heard no more. And what is Scotland-yard now? How have its old customs changed, and how has the ancient simplicity of its inhabitants faded away? The old tottering public house is converted into a spacious and lofty wine vaults. Gold leaf has been used in the construction of the letters which emblazoned its exterior, and the poet's art has been called into requisition to intimate it. If you drink a certain description of ale, you must hold fast by the rail. The tailor exhibits in his window the pattern of a foreign-looking brown surtoot with silk buttons of fur collar and fur cuffs. He wears a stripe down the outside of each leg of his trousers, and we have detected his assistance, for he has assistance now in the act of sitting on the shop-board in the same uniform. At the other end of the little row of houses, a boot-maker has established himself in a brick-box with the additional innovation of a first floor, and here he exposes for sale boots, real Wellington boots, an article which a few years ago none of the original inhabitants had ever seen or heard of. It was but the other day that a dress-maker opened another little box in the middle of the row, and when we thought that the spirit of change could produce no alteration beyond that, a jeweler appeared, and not content with exposing guilt rings and copper bracelets out of number, put up an announcement which still sticks in his window that ladies' ears may be pierced within. The dress-maker employs a young lady who wears pockets in her apron, and the tailor informs the public that gentlemen may have their own materials made up. Amidst all this change and restlessness and innovation there remains but one old man who seems to mourn the downfall of this ancient place. He holds no converse with humankind, but sit on a wooden bench at the angle of the wall which fronts the crossing from White Hall Place, watches in silence the gambles of his sleek and well-fed dogs. He is the presiding genius of Scotland Yard. Years and years have rolled over his head, but in fine weather or in foul, hot or cold, wet or dry, hail, rain or snow he is still in his accustomed spot. Misery and want are depicted in his countenance, his form is bent by age, his head is gray with length of trial, but there he sits from day to day brooding over the past, and thither he will continue to drag his feeble limbs until his eyes have closed upon Scotland Yard and upon the world together. A few years hence, and the antiquary of another generation, looking into some moldy record of the strife and passions that agitated the world in these times, may glance his eye over the pages we have just filled, and not all his knowledge of the history of the past, not all his black letter lore, or his skill in book collecting, not all the dry studies of a long life, or the dusty volumes that have cost him a fortune, may help him to the whereabouts, either of Scotland Yard, or of any one of the landmarks we have mentioned in describing it. CHAPTER V. SEVEN DIALS We have always been of opinion that if Tom King and the Frenchman had not immortalized seven dials, seven dials would have immortalized itself. Seven dials, the region of song and poetry, first effusions and last dying speeches, hallowed by the name of canage-end and of pits, names that will entwine themselves with costar-mongers and barrel-organs, when penny-magazines shall have superseded penny-yards of song and capital punishment be unknown. Look at the construction of the place. The Gordian knot was all very well in its way. So was the maze of Hampton Court. So is the maze at the Bula Spa. So were the ties of stiff white neck-cloths, when the difficulty of getting one on was only to be equal by the apparent impossibility of ever getting it off again. But what involutions can compare with those of seven dials? Where is there such another maze of streets, courts, lanes, and alleys? Where such a pure mixture of Englishmen and Irishmen is in this complicated part of London? We boldly aver that we doubt the veracity of the legend to which we have adverted. We can suppose a man rash enough to inquire at random, at a house with lodgers too, for a Mr. Thompson, with all but the certainty before his eyes, of finding at least two or three Thompson's in any house of moderate dimensions. But a Frenchman. A Frenchman in seven dials. Poo! He was an Irishman. Tom King's education had been neglected in his infancy, and as he couldn't understand half the man said, he took it for granted he was talking French. The stranger who finds himself in the dials for the first time, and stands bellzoni-like at the entrance of seven obscure passages, uncertain which to take, will see enough around him to keep his curiosity and attention awake for no inconsiderable time. From the irregular square into which he has plunged, the streets and courts dart in all directions, until they are lost in the unwholesome vapor which hangs over the housetops and renders the dirty perspective uncertain and confined, and lounging at every corner, as if they came there to take a few gasp of such fresh air as has found its way so far, but is too much exhausted already to be enabled to force itself into the narrow alleys around are groups of people whose appearance and dwellings would fill any mind but a regular Londoners with astonishment. On one side a little crowd has collected round a couple of ladies who, having imbibed the content of various three-outs of gin and bitters in the course of the morning, have at length deferred on some point of domestic arrangement, and are on the eve of settling the quarrel satisfactorily by an appeal to blows greatly to the interest of other ladies who live in the same house and tenements adjoining, and who are all partisans on one side or other. Why don't you pitch into her, Sarah, exclaims one half-dressed matron by way of encouragement? Why don't you, if my husband had treated her with a drain last night, unbeknown to me, I tear her precious eyes out, a wixen. What's the matter, ma'am, inquires another old woman who has just bustled up to the spot? Matter, replies the first speaker, talking at the obnoxious combatant, matter. Here's poor dear Mrs. Solowyn, as has five blessed children of her own, can't go out to Charon for one afternoon, but what horses must be a common and Tyson away around has been, as she's been married to twelve-year come next Easter Monday, for I see the certificate when I was a drink and a cup of tea with her, only the worried last blessed fenn's day as ever was sent. I happen to say promiscuously Mrs. Solowyn says I. What do you mean by Hussies interrupts a champion of the other party, who has evinced a strong inclination throughout to get up a branch-fight on her own account? Heror ejaculates a potboy in parentheses, put the kibosk on her marry. What do you mean by Hussies reiterates the champion? Never mind, replies the opposition expressively. Never mind, you go home, and then you're quite sober, mend your stockings. This somewhat personal allusion, not only to the ladies' habits of intemperance, but also to the state of her wardrobe, rouses her utmost ire, and she accordingly complies with the urgent request of the bystanders to pitch in with considerable alacrity. The scuffle became general and terminates in minor playbill phraseology with a rival of the policemen interior of the station house and impressive denouement. In addition to the numerous groups who are idling about the gin shops and squabbling in the centre of the road, every post in the open space has its occupant who leans against it for hours, with listless perseverance. It is odd enough that the one class of men in London appear to have no enjoyment beyond leaning against posts. We never saw a regular bricklayer's labor take any other recreation fighting accepted. Passed through St. Giles in the evening of a weekday, there they are in their Faustian dresses, spotted with brick dust and white wash, leaning against posts. Walk through seven dials on Sunday morning, there they are again, drab or light corduroy trousers, blucher boots, blue coats, and great yellow waistcoats leaning against posts. The idea of a man dressing himself and is best close to lean against a post all day. The peculiar character of these streets and the close resemblance each one bears to its neighbour by no means tends to decrease the bewilderment in which the unexperienced wayfare through the dials finds himself involved. He traverses streets of dirty, straggling houses with now and then an unexpected court composed of buildings as ill-proportioned and deformed as the half-naked children that wallow in the kennels. Here and there a little dark chandler shop with a cracked bell hung up behind the door to announce the entrance of a customer or betray the presence of some young gentleman in whom a passion for shop-tills has developed itself at an early age, others as if for support against some handsome lofty building which usurps the place of a low, dingy public house, long rows of broken and patched windows, exposed plants that may have flourished when the dials were built in vessels as dirty as the dials themselves, and shops for the purchase of rags, bones, old iron, and kitchen-stuff, vie in cleanliness with the bird fanciers and rabbit-dealers, which one might fancy so many arcs, but for the irresistible conviction that no bird in its proper senses who was permitted to leave one of them would ever come back again. Broker shops, which would seem to have been established by humane individuals as refugees for destitute bugs, interspersed with announcements of day-schools, petty theatres, petition writers, mangles, and music for balls or routs, complete the still life of the subject, and dirty man, filthy woman, squalid children, fluttering shuttlecocks, nosy battle-dords, reeking pipes, bad fruit, more than doubtful oysters, attenuated cats, depressed dogs, and anatomical fowls are its cheerful accompaniments. If the external appearance of the houses or a glance at their inhabitants present but few attractions, a closer acquaintance with either is little calculated to alter one's first impression. Every room has its separate tenet, and every tenet is, by the mysterious dispensation which causes a country curate to increase and multiply most marvelously, generally the head of a numerous family. The man in the shop, perhaps, is in the baked gemmy line, or the firewood and hearthstone line, or any other line which requires a floating capital of eighteen pence or thereabouts, and he and his family live in the shop and the small black parlor behind it. Then there is an Irish labourer and his family in the back kitchen, and a jobbing man, a carpet-beater and so forth, with his family on the front one. In the front one pair there is another man with another wife and family, and in the back one pair there is a young woman as takes in timbre work and dresses quite gentile, who talks a good deal about my friend and can't bear anything low. The second floor front and the rest of the lodgers are just a second addition of the people below, except a shabby gentile man in the back attic, who has his half pint of coffee every morning from the coffee shop next door but one, which boasts a little front den called a coffee-room, with a fireplace over which is an inscription politely requesting that to prevent mistakes, customers will please to pay on delivery. The shabby gentile man is an object of some mystery, but as he leads a life of seclusion, and never was known to buy anything beyond an occasional pen, except half-pints of coffee, penny-lows, and half-worths of ink, his fellow lodgers very naturally suppose him to be an author and rubers are current in the dials that he writes poems for Mr. Warren. Now anybody who passed through the dials on a hot summer's evening and saw the different women at the house gossiping on the streets would be apt to think that all was harmony among them, and that a more primitive set of people than the native dialers could not be imagined. Alas, the man in the shop ill-treats his family, the carpet-beater extends his professional pursuits to his wife, the one-pair front has an undying feud with the two-pair front, in consequence of the two-pair front persisting in dancing over his, the one-pair front's, head when he and his family have retired for the night. The two-pair back will interfere with the front kitchen's children. The Irishman comes home drunk every other night and attacks everybody, and the one-pair black screams at everything. Animosities spring up between floor and floor, the very cellar asserts its equality. Mrs. A smacks Mrs. B child for making faces. Mrs. B forthwith throws cold water over Mrs. A child for calling names. The husbands are embroiled. The quarrel becomes general. An assault is the consequence, and a police officer is the result. CHAPTER VI. Meditations in Monmouth Street. We have always entertained a particular attachment toward Monmouth Street as the only true and real emporium for second-hand wearing apparel. Monmouth Street is venerable from its antiquity and respectable from its usefulness. Holywell Street we despise, the red-headed and red-whiskered Jews who forcibly haul you into their squalid houses and thrust you into a suit of clothes whether you will or not we detest. The inhabitants of Monmouth Street are a distinct class, a peaceable and retiring race who admire themselves for the most part in deep cellars or small back parlours and whose seldom come forth into the world except in the dusk and coolness of the evening when they may be seen seated in chairs on the pavement smoking their pipes or watching the gambles of their engaging children as they revel in the gutter, a happy troupe of infantile scavengers. Their countenances bear a thoughtful and a dirty cast, certain indications of their love of traffic, and their habitations are distinguished by that disregard of outward appearance and neglect of personal comfort so common among people who are constantly immersed in profound speculations and deeply engaged in sedentary pursuits. We have hinted at the antiquity of our favorite spot. On Monmouth Street laced coat was a byword a century ago, and still we find Monmouth Street the same. Pilot great coats with wooden buttons have usurped the place of the ponderous laced coats with full skirts, embroidered waistcoats with large flaps have yielded to double-breasted checks with roll-collars, and three-quartered hats of quaint appearance have given place to the low crowns and broad brims of the Coachman School. But it is the times that have changed not Monmouth Street. Through every alteration and every change Monmouth Street has still remained the burial-place of the fashions, and such to judge from all present appearances it will remain until there are no more fashions to bury. We love to walk among these extensive groves of the illustrious dead, and to indulge in the speculations to which they give rise, now fitting a deceased coat, then a dead pair of trousers, and anon the mortal remains of a gaudy waistcoat, upon some being of our own conjuring up and endeavouring from the shape and fashion of the garment itself to bring its former owner before our mind's eye. We have gone on speculating in this way until whole rows of coats have started from their pegs and buttoned up of their own accord round the waist of imaginary wearers. Lines of trousers have jumped down to meet them. Waistcoats have almost burst with anxiety to put themselves on, and half an acre of shoes have suddenly found feet to fit them, and gone stumping down the street with a noise which has fairly awakened us from our pleasant reverie, and driven us slowly away with a bewildered stare, an object of astonishment to the good people of Monmouth Street, and of no slight suspicion to the policeman at the opposite street corner. We were occupied in this manner the other day, endeavouring to fit a pair of lace-up half-boots on an ideal percentage, for whom, to say the truth, they were full a couple of sizes too small, when our eyes happened to a light on a few suits of clothes ranged outside a shop window, which had immediately struck us must at different periods have all belonged to, and been worn by, the same individual, and had now by one of those strange conjunctions of circumstances which will occur sometimes, come to be exposed together for sale in the same shop. The idea seemed a fantastic one, and we looked at the clothes again with a firm determination not to be easily led away. No, we were right. The more we looked, the more we were convinced of the accuracy of our previous impression. There was the man's whole life, written as legibly on those clothes, as if we had his autobiography engrossed on parchment before us. The first was a patched and much soiled skeleton suit, one of those straight blue cloth cases in which small boys used to be confined before belts and tunics had come in, and old notions had gone out, an ingenious contrivance for displaying the full symmetry of a boy's figure by fastening him into a very tight jacket with an ornamental row of buttons over each shoulder, and then buttoning his trousers over it so as to give his legs the appearance of being hooked on just under the armpits. This was the boy's dress. It had belonged to a town boy, we could see. There was a shortness about the legs and arms of the suit, and a begging at the knees peculiar to the rising youth of London streets. A small day-school he had been at evidently. If it had been at a regular boy's school they wouldn't have let him play on the floor so much and rub his knees so white. He had an indulgent mother, too, and plenty of hapens, as the numerous smears of some sticky substance about the pockets, and just below the chin, which even the salesman's skill could not succeed in disguising, sufficiently betokened. They were decent people, but not overburdened with riches, or he would not have so far outgrown the suit when he passed into those corduroy's with the round jacket in which he went to a boy's school, however, and learned to write, and in ink of pretty tolerable blackness, too, if the place where he used to wipe his pen might be taken as evidence. A black suit and the jacket changed into a diminutive coat. His father had died, and the mother had got the boy a message-lad's place in some office, a long-worn suit that one, rusty and threadbare before it was laid aside, but clean and free from soil to the last, poor woman. We could imagine her assumed cheerfulness over the scanty meal, and the refusal of her own small portion that her hungry boy might have enough. Her constant anxiety for his welfare, her pride in his growth mingled sometimes with the thought almost too acute to bear, that as he grew to be a man his old affection might cool, old kindnesses fade from his mind, and old promises be forgotten, the sharp pain that even then a careless word or a cold look would give her, all crowded on our thoughts as vividly as if the very scene were passing before us. These things happen every hour, and we all know it. And yet we felt as much sorrow when we saw or fancied we saw, it makes no difference which, the change that began to take place now, as if we had just conceived the bare possibility of such a thing for the first time. The next suit, smart but slovenly, meant to be gay, and yet not have so decent as the threadbare apparel, redolent of the idle lounge, and the blackard companions told us we thought that the widow's comfort had rapidly faded away. We could imagine that coat, imagine, we could see it, we had seen it a hundred times, soldering in company with three or four other coats of the same cut, about some place of profligate resort at night. We dressed from that same shop window in an instant, half a dozen boys of from fifteen to twenty, and putting cigars into their mouths and their hands into their pockets, watched them as they sauntered down the street and lingered at the corner with the obscene jest and the oft-repeated oath. We never lost sight of them till they had cocked their hats a little more on one side, and swaggered into the public house, and then we entered the desolate home where the mother sat late in the night alone. We watched her as she paced the room in feverish anxiety, and every now and then opened the door, looked wistfully into the dark and empty street, and again returned, to be again and again disappointed. We beheld the look of patience with which she bore the brutish threat, nay, even the drunken blow, and we heard the agony of tears that gushed from her very heart as she sank upon her knees in her solitary and wretched apartment. A long period had elapsed, and a greater change had taken place by the time of casting off the suit that hung above. It was that of a stoat, broad-shouldered, sturdy chested man, and we knew at once as anybody would who glanced at that broad-skirted green coat with the large metal buttons, that it's where seldom walked forth without a dog at his heels, and some idle ruffian the very counterpart of himself at his side. The vices of the boy had grown with the man, and we fancied his home, then, if such a place deserved the name. We saw the barren, miserable room, destitute of furniture, crowded with his wife and children, pale, hungry, and emaciated. The man cursing their lamentation, staggering to the tap-room, for whence he had just returned, followed by his wife at a sickly infant, clamouring for bread, and heard the street wrangle and noisy recrimination that is striking her occasioned. And then imagination led us to some metropolitan workhouse, situated in the midst of crowded streets and alleys, filled with noxious vapours and ringing with boisterous cries, where an old and feeble woman, imploring pardon for her son, lay dying in a close dark room, with no child to clasp her hand, and no pure air from heaven to fan her brow. A stranger closed the eyes that settled into a cold, unmeaning glare, and strange airs received the words that murmured from the white and half-closed lips. A coarse round frock with a worn cotton neckerchief and other articles of clothes with a commonest description completed the history. A prison and a sentence. Banishment or the gallows? What would the man have given then to be once again the contented humble drudge of his boyish years, to have been restored to life but for a week, a day, an hour, a minute, only for so long a time as would enable him to say one word of passionate regret to and hear one sound of heartful forgiveness from the cold and ghastly form that lay rotting in the popper's grave. The children wild in the streets, the mother a destitute widow, both deeply tainted with the deep disgrace of the husband and father's name, and impelled by sheer necessity down the precipice that had led him to a lingering death, possibly of many years' duration, thousands of miles away. We had no clue to the end of the tale, but it was easy to guess its termination. We took a step or two further on, and by way of restoring the naturally cheerful tone of our thoughts began fitting visionary feet and legs into a cellar board full of boots and shoes with the speed and accuracy that would have astonished the most expert artist in leather living. There was one pair of boots in particular, a jolly, good-tempered, hearty-looking pair of tops that excited our warmest regard, and we had got a fine red-faced jovial fellow of a market-gardener into them before we had made their acquaintance half a med. They were just the very thing for him. There was his huge fat legs bulging over the tops and fitting them too tight to admit of his tucking in the loops he had pulled them on by, and his knee cords with an interval of stocking, and his blue apron tucked up round his waist, and his red neck-a-chef and blue coat, and a white hat stuck on one side of his head, and there he stood with a broad grin on his great red face whistling away as if any other idea but that of being happy and comfortable had never entered his brain. This was the very man after our own heart. We knew all about him. We had seen him coming up to Covent Garden in his green shea's cart, with the fat, tummy-little horse half a thousand times, and even while we cast an affectionate look upon his boots at that instant the form of a coquettish servant made suddenly sprung into a pair of Denmark satin shoes that stood beside them, and we had once recognized the very girl who accepted his offer of a ride, just on this side the Hammersmith Suspension Bridge, the very last Tuesday morning we rode into town from Richmond. A very smart female and a showy bonnet stepped into a pair of grey cloth boots with black fringe and binding that were studiously pointing out their toes on the other side of the top boots, and seemed very anxious to engage his attention, but we didn't observe that our friend the market gardener appeared at all captivated with these blandishments, for beyond giving a knowing wink when they first began, as if to imply that he quite understood their end and object, he took no further notice of them. His indifference, however, was amper-recompensed by the excessive gallantry of a very old gentleman with a silver-headed stick who tottered into a pair of large, list shoes that were standing in one corner of the board, and indulged in a variety of gestures expressive of his admiration of the lady in the cloth boots, to the immeasurable amusement of a young fellow we put into a pair of long-quartered pumps, who we thought would have split the coat that slid down to meet him with laughing. We had been looking on at this little pantomime with great satisfaction for some time. When to our unspeakable astonishment we perceived that the whole of the characters, including a numerous cord de ballet of boots and shoes in the background, into which we had been hastily thrusting as many feet as we could press into the service, were arranging themselves in order for dancing, and some music striking up at that moment to it they went without delay. It was perfectly delightful to witness the agility of the market gardener. Out went the boots first on one side, then on the other, then cutting, then shuffling, then setting to the Denmark satins, then advancing, then retreating, then going round, and then repeating the hold of the evolutions again without appearing to suffer in the least from the violence of the exercise. Nor were the Denmark satins a bit behind hand, for they jumped and bounded about in all directions, as though they were neither so regular nor so true to the time as the cloth boots, still as they seem to do it from the heart, and to enjoy it more, we candidly confess that we prefer their style of dancing to the other. But the old gentleman in the list shoes was the most amusing object in the whole party, for besides his grotesque attempts to appear youthful and amorous, which were sufficiently entertaining in themselves, the young fellow in the pumps managed so artfully that every time the old gentleman advanced to salute the lady in the cloth boots, he trod with his whole weight on the old fellow's toes, which made him roar with anguish and rendered all the others like to die of laughing. We were in the full enjoyment of these festivities. When we heard a shrill, and by no means musical voice exclaim, Hope you'll know me again, imprints! And on looking intently forward to see from whence the sound came, we found that it proceeded not from the young lady in the cloth boots, as we had first been inclined to suppose, but from a bulky lady of elderly appearance who was seated in a chair at the head of the cellar steps, apparently for the purpose of superintending the sale of the articles arranged there. A barrel organ, which had been in full force close behind us, ceased playing. The people we had been fitting into the shoes and boots took to flight at the interruption, and as we were conscious that in the depth of our meditations we might have been rudely staring at the old lady for half an hour without knowing it, we took to flight too, and were soon immersed in the deepest obscurity of the adjacent dials. CHAPTER VII HACKEY COACH STANS We maintain that hackney-couches, properly so called, belong solely to the metropolis. We may be told that there are hackney-couch stands in Edinburgh, and not to go quite so far for a contradiction to our position, we may be reminded that Liverpool, Manchester, and other large towns, as the parliamentary phrase goes, have their hackney-couch stands. We readily concede to these places the possession of certain vehicles which may look almost as dirty and even go almost as slowly as London hackney-couches, but that they have the slightest claim to compete with the metropolis, either in point of stands, drivers, or cattle, we indignantly deny. Take a regular, ponderous, rickety London hackney-coach of the old school, and let any man have the boldness to assert, if he can, that he ever beheld any object on the face of the earth which at all resembles it, unless indeed it were another hackney-coach of the same date. We have recently observed on certain stands, and we say it with deep regret, rather dapper green chariots and coaches of polished yellow with four wheels of the same colour as the coach, whereas it is perfectly notorious to every one who has studied the subject that every wheel ought to be of a different colour and a different size. These are innovations and, like other miscalled improvements, awful signs of the restlessness of the public mind and the little respect paid to our time-honoured institutions. Why should hackney-couches be clean? Our ancestors found them dirty and left them so. Why should we, with a feverish wish to keep moving, desire to roll along at the rate of six miles an hour while they were content to rumble over the stones at four? These are solemn considerations. Hackney-coaches are part and parcel of the law of the land. They were settled by the legislature, plated and numbered by the wisdom of Parliament. Then why have they been swapped by cabs and omnibuses? Or why should people be allowed to ride quickly for eight pence a mile after Parliament had come to the solemn decision that they should pay a shilling a mile for riding slowly? We pause for a reply. And having no chance of getting one, begin a fresh paragraph. Our acquaintance with Hackney-coach stands is of long-standing. We are a walking book of fares, feeling ourselves half bound, as it were, to be always in the right on contested points. We know all the regular watermen within three miles of Covent Garden by sight, and should be almost tempted to believe that all the Hackney-coach horses in that district knew us by sight, too, if one half of them were not blind. We take great interest in Hackney-coaches, but we seldom drive, having a knack of turning ourselves over when we attempt to do so. We are as great friends to horses, Hackney-coach and otherwise, as the renowned Mr. Martin of Costa-Monger notoriety, and yet we never ride. We keep no horse but a clothes-horse, enjoy no saddle so much as a saddle of mutton, and following our own inclinations have never followed the hounds, leaving these fleeter means of getting over-ground or of depositing oneself upon it to those who like them by Hackney-coach stands we take our stand. There is a Hackney-coach stand under the very window at which we are riding. There is only one coach on it now, but it is a fair specimen of the class of vehicles to which we have alluded, a great lumbering square concern of a dingy yellow color like a bilious brunette, with very small glasses but very large frames. The panels are ornamented with a faded coat of arms in shape something like a dissected bat. The axle-tree is red, and the majority of the wheels are green. The box is partially covered by an old greatcoat with a multiplicity of capes and some extraordinary-looking clothes, and the straw with which the canvas cushion is stuffed is sticking up in several places as if in rivalry of the hay which is peeping through the chinks in the boot. The horses with drooping heads and each with a mane and tail as scanty and straggling as those of a worn-out rocking-horse are standing patiently on some damp straw, occasionally wincing and rattling the harness, and now and then one of them lifts his mouth to the air of his companion as if he were saying in a whisper that he should like to assassinate the coachman. The coachman himself is in the watering-house, and the waterman with his hands forced into his pockets as far as they can possibly go is dancing the double shuffle in front of the pump to keep his feet warm. The servant-girl with the pink ribbons at number five opposite suddenly opens the street door and four small children forthwith rush out and scream, Coach, with all their might and mane. The waterman darts from the pump, seizes the horses by their respective bridles, and drags them and the coach to round the house, shouting all the time for the coachman at the very top, or rather very bottom of his voice, for it is a deep base growl. A response is heard from the tap-room, the coachman in his wooden-soled shoes makes the street echo again as he runs across it, and then there is such a struggling and backing and grating of the candle to get the coach door opposite the house door that the children are in perfect ecstasies of delight. What a commotion! The old lady who has been stopping there for the last month is going back to the country, out comes box after box, and one side of the vehicle is filled with luggage and no time, the children get in everybody's way, and the youngest who has upset himself in his attempts to carry an umbrella is born off wounded and kicking. The youngsters disappear, and a short pause ensues, during which the old lady is no doubt kissing them all round in the back parlor. She appears at last, followed by her married daughter, all the children and both the servants, who, with the joint assistance of the coachman and waterman, manage to get her safely into the couch. A cloak is handed in and a little basket, which we can almost swear contains a small black bottle and a paper of sandwiches. Up go the steps, bang goes the door, golden cross, the chairing cross toms, says the waterman, goodbye, grandma, cry the children, off jingles the couch at the rate of three miles an hour, and the mama and children retire into the house, with the exception of one little villain who runs up the street at the top of his speed pursued by the servant, not ill pleased to have such an opportunity of displaying her attractions. She brings him back, and after casting two or three gracious glances across the way, which are either intended for us or the pot boy, we are not quite certain which, shuts the door, and the hackney-coach stand is again at a standstill. We have been frequently amused with the intense delight with which a servant of all work, who is sent for a couch, deposits himself inside, and the unspeakable gratification which boys, who have been dispatched on a similar errand, appear to derive from mounting the box. But we never recollect who have been more amused with a hackney-coach party than one we saw early the other morning in Tottingham Court Road. It was a wedding party, and emerged from one of the inferior streets near Fitzroy Square. There were the bride with a thin white dress and a great red face, and the bridesmaid, a little dumpy, good-humored young woman, dressed of course in the same appropriate costume, and the bridegroom and his chosen friend in blue coats, yellow waistcoats, white trousers, and Berlin gloves to match. They stopped at the corner of the street, and called a coach with an air of indescribable dignity. The moment they were in, the bridesmaid threw a red shawl which she had no doubt brought on purpose, negligently over the number on the door, evidently to delude pedestrians into the belief that the hackney-coach was a private carriage, and away they went perfectly satisfied that the imposition was successful, and quite unconscious that there was a great staring number stuck up behind on a plate as large as a schoolboy slate, a shilling a mile, the ride was worth five at least to them. What an interesting book a hackney-coach might produce if it could catch as much in its head as it does in its body. The autobiography of a broken-down hackney-coach would surely be as amusing as the autobiography of a broken-down hackneyed dramatist, and it might tell as much of the travels with the pole as others have of their expeditions to it. How many stories might be related of the different people it had conveyed on matters of business or profit, pleasure or pain, and how many melancholy tales of the same people at different periods? The country girl, the showy overdressed woman, the drunken prostitute, the raw apprentice, the dissipated spend-thrift, the thief, talk of cabs. Cabs are all very well in cases of expedition, when it's a matter of neck or nothing, life or death, your temporary home or your long one. But besides a cabs lacking that gravity of deportment which so peculiarly distinguishes a hackney-coach, let it never be forgotten that a cab is a thing of yesterday, and that he never was anything better. A hackney-cab has always been a hackney-cab from his first entry into life, whereas a hackney-coach is a remnant of past gentility, a victim to fashion, a hanger-on of an old English family wearing their arms, and in days of yore escorted by men wearing their livery stripped of his finery, and thrown upon the world like a once-smart footman when he is no longer sufficiently juvenile for his office, progressing lower and lower in the scale of four-wheeled degradation until at last it comes to a stand. CHAPTER VIII. Walking without any definite object through St. Paul's churchyard a little while ago, we happened to turn down a street entitled Paul's chain, and keeping straight forward for a few hundred yards, found ourselves as a natural consequence in Drs. Commons. Now Drs. Commons, being familiar by name to everybody, as the place where they grant marriage licenses to love-sick couples, and divorces to unfaithful ones, register the wills of people who have any property to leave, and punish hasty gentlemen who call ladies by unpleasant names, we no sooner discovered that we were really within its precincts than we felt a laudable desire to become better acquainted therewith, and as the first object of our curiosity was the court, whose decrees can even unloose the bonds of matrimony, we procured a direction to it, and bent our steps thither without delay. Crossing a quiet and shady courtyard paved with stone, and frowned upon by old red brick houses, on the doors of which were painted the names of sundry learned civilians, we paused before a small green-based brass-headed nailed door, which yielding to our gentle bush at once admitted us into an old, quaint-looking apartment, with sunken windows and black-carved wainscotting, at the upper end of which, seated on a raised platform of semicircular shape, were about a dozen solemn-looking gentlemen in crimson gowns and wigs. Four elevated desks in the centre sat a very fat and red-faced gentleman in tortoise-shell spectacles whose dignified appearance announced the judge, and round a long, green-based table below, something like a billiard-table without the cushions and pockets, were a number of very self-important-looking personages in stiff neck-claws and black gowns with white fur collars whom we at once set down as proctors. At the lower end of the billiard-table was an individual in an arm-chair and wig whom we afterwards discovered to be the registrar, and seated behind a little desk near the door were a respectable-looking man in black of about twenty stone weight or thereabouts, and a fat-faced, smirking, civil-looking body in a black gown, black kid-gloves, knee-shorts and silks, with a shirt-frill in his bosom, curls on his head, and a silver staff in his hand whom we had no difficulty in recognizing as the officer of the court. The latter indeed speedily set our minds at rest upon this point, for advancing to our elbow and opening a conversation forthwith, he had communicated to us in less than five minutes that he was the apperitor, and the other the court-keeper, that this was the arch's court, and therefore the council wore red gowns and the proctor's fur collars, and that when the other court sat there they didn't wear red gowns or fur collars, either, with many other scrapes of intelligence equally interesting. Besides these two officers there was a little thin old man with long grisly hair crouched in a remote corner whose duty our communicative friend informed us was to ring a large hand-bell when the court opened in the morning, and who, for ought his appearance be token to the contrary, might have been similarly employed for the last two centuries at least. The red-faced gentleman in the tortoise-shell spectacles had got all the talk to himself just then, and very well he was doing it too, only he spoke very fast, but that was habit, and rather thick, but that was good living. So we had plenty of time to look about us. There was one individual who amused us mightily. This was one of the bewigged gentlemen in the red robes who was straddling before the fire in the centre of the court in the attitude of the brazen colossus to the complete exclusion of everybody else. He had gathered up his robe behind in much the same manner as a slovenly woman would her petticoats on a very dirty day in order that he might feel the full warmth of the fire. His wig was put on, all awry, with the tail straggling about his neck, his scanty grey trousers and short black gaiters, made in the worst possible style, imported an additional inelegant appearance to his uncouth person, and his limp, badly starched shirt-collar almost obscured his eyes. We shall never be able to claim any credit as a physiognomist again. For after a careful scrutiny of this gentleman's countenance we had come to the conclusion that it bespoke nothing but conceit and silliness when our friend with the silver staff whispered in our ear that he was no other than a doctor of civil law and heaven knows what besides. So of course we were mistaken, and he must be a very talented man. He conceals it so well, though, perhaps with the merciful view of not astonishing ordinary people too much, that you would suppose him to be one of the stupidest dogs alive. The gentleman in the spectacles, having concluded his judgment, and a few minutes having been allowed to elapse to afford time for the buzz of the court to subside, the registrar called on the next cause, which was the office of the judge promoted by Bumple Against Sludbury. A general movement was visible in the court at this announcement, and the obliging functionary with silver staff whispered us that there would be some fun now, for this was a brawling case. We were not readard much the wiser by this piece of information, till we found by the opening speech of the Council for the Promoter that under a half-obsolete statute of one of the Edwards the court was empowered to visit with the penalty of excommunication any person who should be proved guilty of the crime of brawling or smiting in any church or vestri adjoining thereto, and it appeared by some eight-and-twenty affidavits, which were duly referred to, that on a certain night at a certain vestry meeting in a certain parish, particularly set forth, Thomas Sludbury, the party appeared against in that suit, had made use of and applied to Michael Bumple, the promoter, the words, you be blowed, and that on the said Michael Bumple and others remonstrating with the said Thomas Sludbury, on the impropriety of his conduct, the said Thomas Sludbury repeated the aforesaid expression, you be blowed, and furthermore desired and requested to know whether the said Michael Bumple wanted anything for himself, adding, that if the said Michael Bumple did want anything for himself, he, the said Thomas Sludbury, was the man to give it him, at the same time making use of other heinous and sinful expressions, all of which, Bumple submitted, came within the intent and meaning of the act, and therefore he, for the soul's health and chastening of Sludbury, prayed for sentence of excommunication against him accordingly. Upon these facts a long argument was entered into on both sides, to the great edification of a number of persons interested in the parochial squabbles who crowded the court, and when some very long and grave speeches had been made pro and con, the red-faced gentleman in the tortoise-shell spectacles took a review of the case, which occupied half an hour more, and then pronounced upon Sludbury the awful sentence of excommunication for a fortnight, and payment of the cost of the suit. Upon this, Sludbury, who was a little red-faced, sly-looking ginger-beer cellar, addressed the court, and said, if they'd be good enough to take off the costs, and excommunicate him for the term of his natural life instead, it would be much more convenient to him, for he never went to church at all. To this appeal the gentleman in the spectacles made no other reply than a look of virtuous indignation, and Sludbury and his friends retired. As the man with the silver staff informed us that the court was on the point of rising, we retired too, pondering as we walked away upon the beautiful spirit of these ancient ecclesiastical laws, the kind and neighborly feelings they are calculated to awaken, and the strong attachment to religious institutions which they cannot fail to engender. We were so lost in these meditations, that we had turned into the street and run up against a door-post before we recollected where we were walking. On looking upward to see what host we had stumbled upon, the words prerogative office, written in large characters, met our eye, and as we were in a sight-seeing humor and the place was a public one, we walked in. The room into which we walked was a long, busy-looking place, partitioned off on either side into a variety of little boxes, in which a few clerks were engaged in copying or examining deeds. Down the center of the room were several desks nearly breast-high at each of which three or four people were standing, pouring over large volumes. As we knew that they were searching for wills, they attracted our attention at once. It was curious to contrast the lazy indifference of the attorney's clerks who were making a search for some legal purpose with the air of earnestness and interest which distinguished the strangers to the place who were looking up the will of some deceased relative, the former pausing every now and then with an impatient yawn or raising their heads to look at the people who passed up and down the room, the latter stooping over the book and running down column after column of names in the deepest abstraction. There was one little dirty-faced man in a blue apron who after a whole morning search extending some fifty years back had just found the will to which he wished to refer, which one of the officials was reading to him in a low-hurried voice from a thick vealum book with large clasps. It was perfectly evident that the more the clerk read, the less the man with the blue apron understood about the matter. When the volume was first brought down, he took off his hat, smoothed down his hair, smiled with great self-satisfaction, and looked up in the reader's face with the air of a man who had made up his mind to recollect every word he heard. The first two or three lines were intelligible enough, but then the technicalities began, and the little man began to look rather dubious. Then came a whole string of complicated trusts, and he was regularly at sea. As the reader proceeded, it was quite apparent that it was a hopeless case, and the little man with his mouth open and his eyes fixed upon his face looked on with an expression of bewilderment and perplexity irresistibly ludicrous. A little further on, a hard-featured old man with a deeply wrinkled face was intently perusing a lengthy will with the aid of a pair of horned spectacles, occasionally pausing from his task and slyly noting down some brief memorandum of the bequests contained in it. Every wrinkle about his toothless mouth and sharp keen eyes told of avarice and cunning. His clothes were nearly threadbare, but it was easy to see that he wore them from choice and not from necessity. All his looks and gestures, down to the very small pinches of snuff which he every now and then took from a little tin canister, told of wealth and penury and avarice. As he leisurely closed the register, put up his spectacles, and folded his scraps of paper in a large leathern pocket-book, we thought what a nice hard bargain he was driving with some poverty-stricken legatee, who, tired of waiting year after year until some life interest should fall in, was selling his chance just as it began to grow most valuable for a twelfth part of its worth. It was a good speculation, a very safe one. The old man showed his pocket-book carefully in the breast of his greatcoat, and hobbled away with a layer of triumph. That will had made him ten years younger at the lowest computation. Having commenced our observations, we should certainly have extended them to another dozen of people at least, had not a sudden shutting up and putting away of the worm-eaten old books, warned us that the time for closing the office had arrived, and thus deprived us of a pleasure, and spared our readers an inflection. We naturally fell into a trade of reflection as we walked homeward, upon the curious old records of likings and dislikings of genocies and revenges, of affection defying the power of death, and hated pursuit beyond the grave which these depositories contained, silent but striking tokens some of them, of excellence of heart and nobleness of soul, melancholy examples, others of the worst passions of human nature. How many men as they lay speechless and help us on the bed of death would have given worlds but for the strength and power to blot out the silent evidence of animosity and bitterness which now stands registered against them in Doctor's Commons. CHAPTER IX London Recreations The wish of persons in the humbler classes of life to ape the manners and customs of those whom fortune has placed above them is often the subject of remark and not unfrequently of complaint. The inclination may, and no doubt does, exist to a great extent among the small gentility, the would-be aristocrats of the middle classes. Tradesmen and clerks, with fashionable novel-reading families and circulating library-subscribing daughters, get up small assemblies in humble imitation of all-max and promenade the dingy large room of some second-rate hotel with as much complacency as the enviable few who are privileged to exhibit their magnificence in that exclusive haunt of fashion and foolery. Aspiring young ladies who read flaming accounts of some fancy fair and high life suddenly grow desperately charitable, visions of admiration and matrimony float before their eyes, some wonderfully meritorious institution which, by the strangest accident in the world, has never been heard of before, is discovered to be in a languishing condition. Thompson's great room, or Johnson's nursery-ground, is forthwith engaged, and the aforesaid young ladies from mere charity exhibit themselves for three days from twelve to four for the small charge of one shilling per head. With the exception of these classes of society, however, and a few weak and insignificant persons, we do not think the attempt at invitation to which we have eluded prevails in any great degree. The different character of the recreations of different classes has often afforded us amusement, and we have chosen it for the subject of our present sketch in the hope that it may possess some amusement for our readers. If the regular city-man who leaves Lloyds at five o'clock and drives home to Hackney, Clapton, Stamford Hill, or elsewhere can be said to have any daily recreation beyond his dinner, it is his garden. He never does anything to it with his own hands, but he takes great pride in it notwithstanding, and if you are desirous of paying your addresses to the youngest daughter, be sure to be in raptures with every flower and shrub it contains. If your poverty of expression compels you to make any distinction between the two, we would certainly recommend your bestowing more admiration on his garden than his wine. He always takes a walk round it before he starts for town in the morning, and is particularly anxious that the fish-pond should be kept especially neat. If you call him on Sunday in summer time, about an hour before dinner, you will find him sitting in an armchair on the lawn behind the house with a straw hat on, reading a Sunday paper. A short distance from him you will most likely observe a handsome periqueter a large brass-wire cage, ten to one, but the two eldest girls are loitering in one side of the walks accompanied by a couple of young gentlemen who are holding parasols over them. Of course only to keep the sun off, while the younger children, with the under-nursery maid, are strolling listlessly about in the shade. Beyond these occasions, his delight in his garden appears to arise more from the consciousness of possession than actual enjoyment of it. When he drives you down to dinner on a weekday, he is rather fatigued with the occupations of the morning and totterly cross into the bargain, but when the cloth is removed and he has drank three or four glasses of his favorite port, he orders the French windows of his dressing-room, which of course look into the garden, to be opened, and throwing a silk handkerchief over his head and leaning back in his armchair, descents at considerable length upon its beauty and the cost of maintaining it. This is to impress you, who are a young friend of the family, with a due sense of the excellence of the garden and the wealth of its owner, and when he has exhausted the subject he goes to sleep. Here is another and a very different class of men whose recreation is their garden. An individual of this class resides some short distance from town, say in the Hampstead Road, or the Kilburn Road, or any other road where the houses are small and neat, and have little slips of back garden. He and his wife, who is as clean and compact a little body as himself, have occupied the same house ever since he retired from business twenty years ago. They have no family. They once had a son, who died at about five years old. The child's portrait hangs over the mantelpiece in the best sitting room, and a little cart he used to draw about is carefully preserved as a relic. In fine weather the old gentleman is almost constantly in the garden, and when it is too wet to go into it he will look out of the window at it by the hour together. He has always something to do there, and you will see him digging and sweeping and cutting and planting with manifest delight. In springtime there is no end to the sowing of seeds and sticking little bits of wood over them with labels which look like epitaphs to their memory. And in the evening, when the sun has gone down, the perseverance with which he lugs a great watering pot about is perfectly astonishing. The only other recreation he has is the newspaper which he peruses every day from beginning to end, generally reading the most interesting pieces of intelligence to his wife during breakfast. The old lady is very fond of flowers as the hyacinth glasses in the parlor window and geranium pots in the little front court testify. She takes great pride in the garden too, and when one of the four fruit trees produces rather a larger gooseberry than usual it is carefully preserved under a wine-glass on the sideboard for the edification of visitors who are duly informed that Mr. So-and-So planted the tree which produced it with his own hands. On a summer's evening, when the large watering pot has been filled and emptied some fourteen times, and the old couple have quite exhausted themselves by trotting about, you will see them sitting happily together in the little summer-house, enjoying the calm and peace of the twilight, and watching the shadows as they fall upon the garden and gradually growing thicker and more somber obscure the tints of their gayest flowers, no bad emblems of the years that have silently rolled over their heads, deadening in their course the brightest hues of early hopes and feelings which have long since faded away. These are their only recreations, and they require no more. They have within themselves the materials of comfort and content, and the only anxiety of each is to die before the other. This is no ideal sketch. There used to be many old people of this description, their numbers may have diminished and may decrease still more. Whether the course female education has taken of late days, whether the pursuit of giddy frivialities and empty nothings has tended to unfit women for that quiet domestic life in which they show far more beautifully than in the most crowded assembly, is a question we should feel little gratification in discussing. We hope not. Let us turn now to another portion of the London population, whose recreations present a boat as strong a contrast as can well be conceived. We mean the Sunday pleasurers, and let us beg our readers to imagine themselves stationed by our side in some well-known rural tea gardens. The heat is intense this afternoon, and the people of whom there are additional parties arriving every moment look as warm as the tables which have been recently painted, and have the appearance of being red-hot. What a dust and noise, men and women, boys and girls, sweethearts and married people, babies and arms and children in chases, pipes and shrimps, cigars and periwinkles, tea and tobacco, gentlemen in alarming waistcoats and steel watch-guards, promenading about three abreast with surprising dignity, or, as the gentleman in the next box facetiously observes, cutting it uncommon fat. Ladies with great long, white pocket-hacker-chefs like small teamwork-loss in their hands, chasing one another on the grass in the most playful and interesting manner, with the view of attracting the attention of the aforesaid gentlemen, husbands in perspective ordering bottles of ginger-beer for the objects of their affection, with a lavish disregard of expense, and the said objects washing down huge quantities of shrimps and winkles with an equal disregard of their own bodily health and subsequent comfort. Boys with great silk hats just balanced on the top of their heads, smoking cigars and trying to look as if they liked them, gentlemen in pink shirts and blue waistcoats occasionally upsetting either themselves or somebody else with their own canes. Some of the finery of these people provokes a smile, but they are all clean and happy and disposed to be good-natured and sociable. Those two motherly-looking women in the smart polices, who are chatting so confidentially, inserting a mam at every fourth word, scraped an acquaintance about a quarter of an hour ago. It originated in admiration of the little boy who belongs to one of them, that diminutive specimen of mortality in the three-quartered pink satin hat with black feathers. The two men in the blue coats and drab trousers who are walking up and down smoking their pipes are their husbands. The party in the opposite box are a pretty fair specimen of the generality of the visitors. These are the father and mother, and old grandmother, a young man and woman, and an individual addressed by the euphonious title of Uncle Bill, who was evidently the wit of the party. They have some half-dozen children with them, but it is scarcely necessary to notice the fact, for that is a matter of course here. Every woman in the gardens, who has been married for any length of time, must have had twins on the two or three occasions. It is impossible to account for the extent of juvenile population in any other way. Observe the inexpressible delight of the old grandmother at Uncle Bill's splendid joke of tea for four, bread and butter for forty, and the loud explosion of mirth which followed his wafering a paper-pig tail on the waiter's collar. The young man is evidently keeping company with Uncle Bill's niece, and Uncle Bill's hints, such as, don't forget the at the dinner you know, I shall look out for the cake-sally, I'll be Godfather to your first, wager it's a boy, and so forth, are equally embarrassing to the young people, and delightful to the elder ones. Just to the old grandmother she is in perfect ecstasies, and does nothing but laugh herself into fits of coughing, until they have finished the gin and water warmth with of which Uncle Bill ordered glasses round after tea, just to keep the night air out, and to do it up comfortable and regular after such an astonishing hot day. It is getting dark, and the people begin to move. The field leading to town is quite full of them. The little hand-chases are dragged wearily along. The children are tired, and amuse themselves and the company generally by crying, or resort to the much more pleasant expedient of going to sleep. The mothers begin to wish they were at home again. Sweethearts grow more sentimental than ever as the time for parting arrives. The gardens look mournful enough by the light of the two lanterns which hang against the trees for the convenience of smokers, and the waiters who have been running about incessantly for the last six hours think they feel a little tired as they count their glasses and their gains. End of Section 16