sad revellers, and should certainly wait till I
had some better consolation to offer before depriving them of their dram
of gin, though death itself were in the glass; for methought their poor
souls needed such fiery stimulant to lift them a little way out of the
smothering squalor of both their outward and interior life, giving them
glimpses and suggestions, even if bewildering ones, of a spiritual
existence that limited their present misery. The temperance-reformers
unquestionably derive their commission from the Divine Beneficence, but
have never been taken fully into its counsels. All may not be lost, though
those good men fail.

Pawn-brokers' establishments, distinguished by the mystic symbol of the
three golden balls, were conveniently accessible; though what personal
property these wretched people could possess, capable of being estimated
in silver or copper, so as to afford a basis for a loan, was a problem
that still perplexes me. Old clothes-men, likewise, dwelt hard by, and
hung out ancient garments to dangle in the wind. There were butchers'
shops, too, of a class adapted to the neighborhood, presenting no such
generously fattened carcasses as Englishmen love to gaze at in the market,
no stupendous halves of mighty beeves, no dead hogs or muttons ornamented
with carved bas-reliefs of fat on their ribs and shoulders, in a
peculiarly British style of art,--not these, but bits and gobbets of lean
meat, selvages snipt off from steaks, tough and stringy morsels, bare
bones smitten away from joints by the cleaver, tripe, liver, bullocks'
feet, or whatever else was cheapest and divisible into the smallest lots.
I am afraid that even such delicacies came to many of their tables hardly
oftener than Christmas. In the windows of other little shops you saw half
a dozen wizened herrings, some eggs in a basket, looking so dingily
antique that your imagination smelt them, fly-speckled biscuits, segments
of a hungry cheese, pipes and papers of tobacco. Now and then a sturdy
milk-woman passed by with a wooden yoke over her shoulders, supporting a
pail on either side, filled with a whitish fluid, the composition of which
was water and chalk and the milk of a sickly cow, who gave the best she
had, poor thing! but could scarcely make it rich or wholesome, spending
her life in some close city-nook and pasturing on strange food. I have
seen, once or twice, a donkey coming into one of these streets with
panniers full of vegetables,