kennels. Here and there, a little dark chandler's 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 expose 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
arks, 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. Brokers' shops, which would seem to have been established by
humane individuals, as refuges for destitute bugs, interspersed with
announcements of day-schools, penny theatres, petition-writers, mangles,
and music for balls or routs, complete the 'still life' of the subject;
and dirty men, filthy women, squalid children, fluttering shuttlecocks,
noisy battledores, 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 tenant, and every tenant is, by the same mysterious
dispensation which causes a country curate to 'increase and multiply'
most marvellously, generally the head of a numerous family.

The man in the shop, perhaps, is in the baked 'jemmy' line, or the
fire-wood and hearth-stone 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 back parlour behind it. Then there is an
Irish labourer and _his_ family in the back kitchen, and a jobbing
man--carpet-beater and so forth--with _his_ family in the front one. In
the front one-pair, there's another man with another wife and family, and
in the back one-pair, there's 'a young 'oman as takes in tambour-work,
and dresses quite genteel,' who talks a good deal about 'my friend,' and
can't 'a-bear anything low.' The second floor front, and the rest o