y instant we are within earshot of a groan;
which is a distance of about ten inches in a London atmosphere. Now an
old, old man, tall, meagre, and decrepit, with haggard eye and
moonstruck visage, bares his aged head to the pattering rain--

'Loose his beard and hoary hair
Stream like a meteor to the troubled air.'

He makes feeble and fitful efforts to sweep a pathway across the road,
and the dashing cab pulls up suddenly just in time to save him from
being hurled to the ground by the horse. Then he gives it up as a vain
attempt, and leans, the model of despair, against the wall, and wrings
his skeleton fingers in agony--when just as a compassionate matron is
drawing the strings of her purse, stopping for her charitable purpose
in a storm of wind and rain, the voice of the policeman is heard over
her shoulder: 'What! you are here at it again, old chap? Well, I'm
blowed if I think anything 'll cure you. You'd better put up your pus,
marm: if he takes your money, I shall take him to the station-us,
that's all. Now, old chap--trot, trot, trot!' And away walks the old
impostor, with a show of activity perfectly marvellous for his years,
the policeman following close at his heels till he vanishes in the
arched entry of a court.

The next specimen is perhaps a 'swell' out at elbows, a seedy and
somewhat ragged remnant of a very questionable kind of gentility--a
gentility engendered in 'coal-holes' and 'cider-cellars,' in 'shades,'
and such-like midnight 'kens'--suckled with brandy and water and
port-wine negus, and fed with deviled kidneys and toasted cheese. He
has run to the end of his tether, is cleaned out even to the last
disposable shred of his once well-stocked wardrobe; and after fifty
high-flying and desperate resolves, and twice fifty mean and sneaking
devices to victimise those who have the misfortune to be assailable by
him, 'to this complexion he has come at last.' He has made a track
across the road, rather a slovenly disturbance of the mud than a
clearance of it; and having finished his performance in a style to
indicate that he is a stranger to the business, being born to better
things, he rears himself with front erect and arms a-kimbo, with one
foot advanced after the approved statuesque model, and exhibits a face
of scornful brass to an unsympathising world, before whom he stands a
monument of neglected merit, and whom he doubtless expects to
overwhelm with unutterable shame for their abominable