hemists' glaring lights, and illuminated besides
with the brilliant flood that streamed from the windows of the shops,
where sparkling jewellery, silks and velvets of the richest colours,
the most inviting delicacies, and most sumptuous articles of luxurious
ornament, succeeded each other in rich and glittering profusion. Streams
of people apparently without end poured on and on, jostling each other
in the crowd and hurrying forward, scarcely seeming to notice the riches
that surrounded them on every side; while vehicles of all shapes and
makes, mingled up together in one moving mass, like running water, lent
their ceaseless roar to swell the noise and tumult.

As they dashed by the quickly-changing and ever-varying objects, it was
curious to observe in what a strange procession they passed before the
eye. Emporiums of splendid dresses, the materials brought from every
quarter of the world; tempting stores of everything to stimulate and
pamper the sated appetite and give new relish to the oft-repeated feast;
vessels of burnished gold and silver, wrought into every exquisite form
of vase, and dish, and goblet; guns, swords, pistols, and patent engines
of destruction; screws and irons for the crooked, clothes for the
newly-born, drugs for the sick, coffins for the dead, and churchyards
for the buried--all these jumbled each with the other and flocking side
by side, seemed to flit by in motley dance like the fantastic groups of
the old Dutch painter, and with the same stern moral for the unheeding
restless crowd.

Nor were there wanting objects in the crowd itself to give new point
and purpose to the shifting scene. The rags of the squalid ballad-singer
fluttered in the rich light that showed the goldsmith's treasures, pale
and pinched-up faces hovered about the windows where was tempting food,
hungry eyes wandered over the profusion guarded by one thin sheet
of brittle glass--an iron wall to them; half-naked shivering figures
stopped to gaze at Chinese shawls and golden stuffs of India. There
was a christening party at the largest coffin-maker's and a funeral
hatchment had stopped some great improvements in the bravest mansion.
Life and death went hand in hand; wealth and poverty stood side by side;
repletion and starvation laid them down together.

But it was London; and the old country lady inside, who had put her head
out of the coach-window a mile or two this side Kingston, and cried out
to the driver that she was s