ure as fate, he lays down the gravel in your garden.

While the graveller is patting down the pathway round Robinson's
flower-bed, we hear the well-known cry of a countryman whom we have
known any time these ten years, and who, with his wife by his side,
has perambulated the suburbs for the best part of his life. He has
taken upon himself the patronage of the laundry department, and he
shoulders a fagot of clothes-poles, ten feet long, with forked
extremities, all freshly cut from the forest. Coils of new rope for
drying are hanging upon his arm, and his wife carries a basket well
stocked with clothes-pins of a superior description, manufactured by
themselves. The cry of 'Clo'-pole-line-pins' is one long familiar to
the neighbourhood; and as this honest couple have earned a good
reputation by a long course of civility and probity, they enjoy the
advantage of a pretty extensive connection. Their perambulations are
confined to the suburbs, and it is a question if they ever enter
London proper from one year's end to another. It is of no use to carry
clothes-poles and drying-lines where there are no conveniences for
washing and drying.

Next comes a travelling umbrella-mender, fagoted on the back like the
man in the moon of the nursery rhyme-book. He is followed at a short
distance by a travelling tinker, swinging his live-coals in a sort of
tin censer, and giving utterance to a hoarse and horrible cry,
intelligible only to the cook who has a leaky sauce-pan. Then comes
the chamois-leather woman, bundled about with damaged skins, in
request for the polishing of plate and plated wares. She is one of
that persevering class who will hardly take 'No' for an answer. It
takes her a full hour to get through the terrace, for she enters every
garden, and knocks at every door from No. 1 to No. 30. In the
winter-time, she pursues an analogous trade, dealing in what may
strictly be termed the raw material, inasmuch as she then buys and
cries hare-skins and rabbit-skins. She has, unfortunately, a
notoriously bad character, and is accused of being addicted to the
practice of taking tenpence and a hare-skin in exchange for a
counterfeit shilling.

By this time it is twelve o'clock and past, and Charley Coster, who
serves the terrace with vegetables, drives up his stout cob to the
door, and is at the very moment we write bargaining with Betty for new
potatoes at threepence-half-penny a pound. Betty declares it is a
scandalous price for