ndubitably seen brooming the muddy ways
for the chance of a half-penny or a penny. It is not very long since
we were addressed in Water Street, Blackfriars, by a middle-aged man
in a garb of seedy black, who handled his broom like one who played
upon a strange instrument, and who, wearing the words _pauper et
pedester_ written on a card stuck in his hat-band, told us, in good
colloquial Latin, a tale of such horrifying misery and destitution,
that we shrink from recording it here. We must pass on to the next on
our list, who is--

No. 4, the _Lucus-a-non_, or a sweeper who never sweeps.--This fellow
is a vagabond of the first-water, or of the first-mud rather. His
stock in trade is an old worn-out broom-stump, which he has shouldered
for these seven years past, and with which he has never displaced a
pound of soil in the whole period. He abominates work with such a
crowning intensity, that the very pretence of it is a torture to him.
He is a beggar without a beggar's humbleness; and a thief, moreover,
without a thief's hardihood. He crawls lazily about the public ways,
and begs under the banner of his broom, which constitutes his
protection against the police. He will collect alms at a crossing
which he would not cleanse to save himself from starvation; or he will
take up a position at one which a morning sweeper has deserted for the
day, and glean the sorry remnants of another man's harvest. He is as
insensible to shame as to the assaults of the weather; he will watch
you picking your way through the mire over which he stands sentinel,
and then impudently demand payment for the performance of a function
which he never dreams of exercising; or he will stand in your path in
the middle of the splashy channel, and pester you with whining
supplications, while he kicks the mire over your garments, and bars
your passage to the pavement. He is worth nothing, not even the short
notice we have taken of him, or the trouble of a whipping, which he
ought to get, instead of the coins that he contrives to extract from
the heedless generosity of the public.

No. 5 is the _Sunday Sweeper_.--This neat, dapper, and cleanly variety
of the genus besom, is usually a young fellow, who, pursuing some
humble and ill-paid occupation during the week, ekes out his modest
salary by labouring with the broom on the Sunday. He has his regular
'place of worship,' one entrance of which he monopolises every Sabbath
morning. Long before the church-goin