e city clerk or shopman cannot frequent it too much.
Highgate has much the air of a provincial town. It has its Literary
Institution, and its police office, and water-works, and gas, its
seminaries for ingenious youth of either sex, and its shops filled with
miscellaneous wares. The great city is creeping up the hill, and seeking
to encircle it with its chains of brick, but it resists lustily, and with
its quaint old houses, and fine old trees, will not assume a cockney
appearance. I honour it for its obstinacy, and trust that it will be
long before it shall have the wicked, busy, towny appearance of the
Modern Babylon.

CHAPTER V.
TOM TIDDLER'S GROUND.

Barry Cornwall tells us that when he was a little boy he was told that
the streets of London were all paved with gold; and it must be admitted
that, to the youthful mind in general, the metropolis is a sort of Tom
Tiddler's ground, where gold and silver are to be picked up in handfuls
any day. There is a good deal of exaggeration in this, undoubtedly. To
many, London is dark and dismal as one of its own fogs, cold and stony as
one of its own streets. The Earl of Shaftesbury, a few years back,
calculated there were 30,000 ragged, houseless, homeless children in our
streets. The number of persons who died last year in the streets of
London, from want of the necessaries of life, would shock a Christian.
Last year the total number of casual destitute paupers admitted into the
workhouses of the metropolitan districts amounted to 53,221 males, 62,622
females, and 25,710 children. We cannot wonder at this when we remember
that it is said 60,000 persons rise every morning utterly ignorant as to
the wherewithal to feed and maintain themselves for the day. Wonderful
are the shifts, and efforts, and ingenuities of this class. One
summer-day, a lady-friend of the writer was driving in one of the
pleasant green lanes of Hornsey, when she saw a poor woman gathering the
broad leaves of the horse-chestnut. She asked her why she did so. The
reply was that she got a living by selling them to the fruiterers in
Covent Garden, who lined the baskets with them in which they placed their
choicest specimens. One day it came out in evidence at a police-court,
that a mother and her children earned a scanty subsistence by rising
early in the morning, or rather late at night, and tearing down and
selling as waste-paper, the broad sheets and placards with which the dead
walls