the voice was whining, but without pathos. There
was a meagre, passionless dulness about the aspect, though at times
it quickened into a kind of avid acuteness. No one knew by what human
parentage this personage came into the world. He had been reared by
the charity of a stranger, crept through childhood and misery and
rags mysteriously; and suddenly succeeded an old defunct negro in
the profitable crossing whereat he is now standing. All education was
unknown to him, so was all love. In those festive haunts at St. Giles's
where he who would see "life in London" may often discover the boy who
has held his horse in the morning dancing merrily with his chosen damsel
at night, our sweeper's character was austere as Charles the Twelfth's.
And the poor creature had his good qualities. He was sensitively alive
to kindness,--little enough had been shown him to make the luxury the
more prized from its rarity! Though fond of money, he would part with it
(we do not say cheerfully, but part with it still),--not to mere want,
indeed (for he had been too pinched and starved himself, and had grown
too obtuse to pinching and to starving for the sensitiveness that
prompts to charity), but to any of his companions who had done him a
good service, or who had even warmed his dull heart by a friendly smile.
He was honest, too,--honest to the backbone. You might have trusted
him with gold untold. Through the heavy clod which man's care had not
moulded, nor books enlightened, nor the priest's solemn lore informed,
still natural rays from the great parent source of Deity struggled,
fitful and dim. He had no lawful name; none knew if sponsors had ever
stood security for his sins at the sacred fount. But he had christened
himself by the strange, unchristian like name of "Beck." There he was,
then, seemingly without origin, parentage, or kindred tie,--a lonesome,
squalid, bloodless thing, which the great monster, London, seemed
to have spawned forth of its own self; one of its sickly, miserable,
rickety offspring, whom it puts out at nurse to Penury, at school to
Starvation, and, finally, and literally, gives them stones for bread,
with the option of the gallows or the dunghill when the desperate
offspring calls on the giant mother for return and home.

And this creature did love something,--loved, perhaps, some
fellow-being; of that hereafter, when we dive into the secrets of his
privacy. Meanwhile, openly and frankly, he loved his crossing; he