d more than one face which I had often seen
in my equestrian lounges through town, peering from the shoulders of
some intrusive, ragamuffin, wagesless lackey, and squealing out of its
wretched, unpampered mouth, the everlasting query of "Want your oss
held, Sir?" The rest were made up of unfortunate women of the vilest
and most ragged description, aged itinerants, with features seared with
famine, bleared eyes, dropping jaws, shivering limbs, and all the mortal
signs of hopeless and aidless, and, worst of all, breadless infirmity.
Here and there an Irish accent broke out in the oaths of national
impatience, and was answered by the shrill, broken voice of some
decrepit but indefatigable votaress of pleasure--(Pleasure! good God!)
but the chief character of the meeting was silence;--silence, eager,
heavy, engrossing; and, above them all, shone out the quiet moon, so
calm, so holy, so breathing of still happiness and unpolluted glory,
as if it never looked upon the traces of human passion, and misery, and
sin. We stood for some moments contemplating the group before us, and
then, following the steps of an old, withered crone, who, with a cracked
cup in her hand, was pushing her way through the throng, we found
ourselves in that dreary pandaemonium, at once the origin and the refuge
of humble vices--a Gin-shop.

"Poor devils," said Dartmore, to two or three of the nearest and
eagerest among the crowd, "come in, and I will treat you."

The invitation was received with a promptness which must have been the
most gratifying compliment to the inviter; and thus Want, which is the
mother of Invention, does not object, now and then, to a bantling by
Politeness.

We stood by the counter while our proteges were served, in silent
observation. In low vice, to me, there is always something too gloomy,
almost too fearful for light mirth; the contortions of the madman are
stranger than those of the fool, but one does not laugh at them; the
sympathy is for the cause--not the effect.

Leaning against the counter at one corner, and fixing his eyes
deliberately and unmovingly upon us, was a man about the age of fifty,
dressed in a costume of singular fashion, apparently pretending to an
antiquity of taste, correspondent with that of the material. This person
wore a large cocked-hat, set rather jauntily on one side,--a black coat,
which seemed an omnium gatherum of all abominations that had come in its
way for the last ten years, and which