able. Objects the most decrepit in
nature, hideous, half-nude wretches, male and female, creep along the
streets, shivering, too evidently starving, till your heart aches at the
spectacle, and you deprive yourself of your last cent to administer
relief. These are impostors. So are the respectable class--the
broken-down tradesmen, who, in a suit of decent black Saxony cloth, and
wearing a spotless white kerchief around their necks, offer lead-pencils
for sale. So respectable are they, that you start to see them, and are
almost ashamed to offer them a dollar; but they will accept a cent, and
will ply the same trade for years to come, in a suit equally as
respectable. It is one of the mysteries connected with them, that their
clothes never wear out. I grew familiar with the features of one of
these respectable men, from seeing him almost daily in some quarter of
London. During the twelve months that I kept my eye upon him, the
condition of his apparel was unchanged. His coat never got old, nor did
he ever have a new one. That man is at this moment an unpleasant puzzle
to me--a conundrum without a solution. The income of this class of
beggars, I was told, is considerable--much better than a clerk's in
Lombard or Wall street.

The lodging-houses of the lowest class of professed beggars, who do not
trade on assumed respectability, or make a pretense of having once been
better off, present to an American a spectacle, or chapter of
spectacles, of which he can previously have no conception. They are
situated in the most densely crowded and dirtiest quarters of the town,
and are approached through lanes of the most noisome filth. No
comparison holds good with any quarter of Boston, New-York,
Philadelphia, or any city of the Union, for there is nothing in our
cities to compare with them. Let us enter one of them. The common
boarding-room, in which meals are taken, is about forty feet long by
twenty broad. Either the floor has never been paved, or a thick layer of
street-soil has hidden the stones for many a day past. Along each side
of a long, narrow table, runs a wooden bench of rough construction,
which is the only seat the place affords. The knives and forks are
chained to the table. Strange implements they are, and a thief, one
would think, must be reduced to shifts indeed if they could offer him a
temptation. Almost every fork has lost one of its prongs, and every
knife has been notched or otherwise abused. The plaster has mo