ne how they should ever
be mistaken for gentlemen by gentlemen themselves. Their voluminousness
of wristband, with an air of excessive frankness, should betray them at
once.

The gamblers, of whom I descried not a few, were still more easily
recognisable. They wore every variety of dress, from that of the
desperate thimble-rig bully, with velvet waistcoat, fancy neckerchief,
gilt chains, and filagreed buttons, to that of the scrupulously inornate
clergyman, than which nothing could be less liable to suspicion. Still
all were distinguished by a certain sodden swarthiness of complexion, a
filmy dimness of eye, and pallor and compression of lip. There were two
other traits, moreover, by which I could always detect them;--a guarded
lowness of tone in conversation, and a more than ordinary extension of
the thumb in a direction at right angles with the fingers.--Very often,
in company with these sharpers, I observed an order of men somewhat
different in habits, but still birds of a kindred feather. They may be
defined as the gentlemen who live by their wits. They seem to prey
upon the public in two battalions--that of the dandies and that of the
military men. Of the first grade the leading features are long locks and
smiles; of the second frogged coats and frowns.

Descending in the scale of what is termed gentility, I found darker
and deeper themes for speculation. I saw Jew pedlars, with hawk eyes
flashing from countenances whose every other feature wore only an
expression of abject humility; sturdy professional street beggars
scowling upon mendicants of a better stamp, whom despair alone had
driven forth into the night for charity; feeble and ghastly invalids,
upon whom death had placed a sure hand, and who sidled and tottered
through the mob, looking every one beseechingly in the face, as if in
search of some chance consolation, some lost hope; modest young girls
returning from long and late labor to a cheerless home, and shrinking
more tearfully than indignantly from the glances of ruffians, whose
direct contact, even, could not be avoided; women of the town of all
kinds and of all ages--the unequivocal beauty in the prime of her
womanhood, putting one in mind of the statue in Lucian, with the surface
of Parian marble, and the interior filled with filth--the loathsome and
utterly lost leper in rags--the wrinkled, bejewelled and paint-begrimed
beldame, making a last effort at youth--the mere child of immature form,
yet,