shelves within are filled with them.
Confined as the limits of Field-lane are, it has its barber, its
coffee-shop, its beer-shop, and its fried fish warehouse. It is a
commercial colony of itself--the emporium of petty larceny, visited at
early morning and setting in of dusk by silent merchants, who traffic in
dark back parlours, and go as strangely as they come. Here the
clothes-man, the shoe vamper, and the rag merchant display their goods as
signboards to the petty thief, and stores of old iron and bones, and
heaps of mildewy fragments of woollen, stuff, and linen rust and rot in
the grimy cellars." Expand this picture. Instead of one street have
several--make it the resort of all the dealers in old clo', old iron, old
rags, old tools, old bones, old anything that a human creature can sell
or buy; fill it with a miscellaneous crowd of Jews, Irish, navvies,
artisans, pickpockets, and thieves, bargaining with all the energy of
which their natures are susceptible; make it damp and warm with their
vapour, and a very Babel with their discordant sounds, and you get a dim
idea of Rag Fair and its guests, unwashed as they appear every day from
twelve to two, but especially on a Sunday, to the great scandal of the
devout and respectable in that locality, who are too apt to quarrel with
the effect and forget the cause.

Let us enter Houndsditch, a place where the Jews collected together long
before the royal house of Guelph occupied its present pleasant position
on the English throne. Poverty and wretchedness, it may be, are bashful
at the West End, but they are not so here,

"Where no contiguous palace rears its head,
To mark the meanness of their humble shed."

In a little court on our left, a little way down, we come to a building
known as the Old Clothes Exchange. The building was erected some dozen
years ago by one of the leading merchants in the old clothes line. A
small entrance fee is demanded. You had better pay, as otherwise
admission will be denied you. You had better not attempt to pass in
without paying, as the toll-collector is an ex-prize-fighter; and the
chances are, in a set-to, you would come off second best. If it be
Sunday you had better not, especially if the weather be warm, attempt a
passage at all. The scrambling, and wedging, and pushing, and driving
are dreadful. A man must have some nerve who forces his way in. In the
week day, and you are a seller, you are soon pounced on by