d two thousand pounds a-year for dust collected, which, being
placed to the parish account, tended in a _great measure_ to keep
down the poor'-rates. In addition to its value, no kind of property is
better secured; as will be evinced, when the reader is informed that his
present Majesty, George IV., when he was Prince Regent, lost an action
for the recovery of the value of dust, carried away from the palace, by
his servants, to be used as manure. In order to a further illustration
of the subject, it is necessary to inform the reader, that what has
hitherto been considered is but a part of that incongruous combination,
the contents of a dust-cart--the very last residuum--the matter called
"brize;" previous to which, by the result of much labour, of picking,
raking, sorting, and sifting, a very pretty property is collected by the
various shareholders of this joint, stock company, as a recent case that
was brought forward at the Bow-street office will suffice to convince
us.[3]

Perhaps the reader may have never witnessed the ejection of a
dust-cart: presuming he has not, I will endeavour to give him a general
outline of the ceremony; together with all the circumstances attending
it, and a sketch of the group and foreground. Suppose an eminence of
about five or six feet already collected, in a circular form; on the
heap is a man raking about, and a little child playing with a small
brown shaggy mongrel of a dog, with a community of pigs battening on
the acclivity; a youth below, with spade and axe, is supplying three
women with stuff--if women they may be called, who, of all the progeny
of old Mother Nox, seemed most the resemblances of age, misery, and
want; I say _seemed_, for when one was called--one of three--I
beheld, as she raised her dilapidated Dunstable, a face, where beams of
pensive beauty struggled through dusty darkness, and which mantled to a
smile at the sound of notes whistled to the tune of--"In Bunhill-row
there liv'd a Maid"--indicating the approach of Joe--for it was _his
cart:_--the dying cadence now gave way to the gee-up! uttered in deep
bass, accompanied with a smart smack of the whip, to urge the horse up
the ascent. Joe was a decent sort of boy enough for his avocation, not
to be ranked among those who "troop under the sooty flag of Acheron;"
but a clean, square-built fellow, with a broadish face and forehead,
blue eyes, nose rather short, expanded, and inclined upwards, and tinted
with that imper