the 'Arry that walketh by night thinks of nothing less than admiring,
with Kant, the starry heavens and the moral nature of man. He seeks his
peers, and together in great bands they loiter or run, stopping to chaff
each other, and to jeer at the passer-by. Their satire is monotonous in
character, chiefly consisting of the words for using which the famous Mr.
Budd beat the baker. {152} Now, the sultry weather makes it absolutely
necessary to leave bedroom windows wide open, so that he who is courting
sleep has all the advantage of studying the dialogue of the slums. These
disturbances last till two in the morning in some otherwise quiet
districts near the river. When Battersea 'Arry has been "on the fly" in
Chelsea, while Chelsea 'Arry has been pursuing pleasure in Battersea, the
homeward-faring bands meet, about one in the morning, on the Embankment.
Then does Cheyne Walk hear the amoebean dialogues of strayed revellers,
and knows not whether Battersea or Chelsea best deserves the pipe, the
short black pipe, for which the rival swains compete in profanity and
slang. In music, too, does this modern Dionysiac procession rejoice, and
Kensington echoes like Cithaeron when Pan was keeping his orgies
there--Pan and the Theban nymphs. The music and the song of the London
street roamer is excessively harsh, crabbed, and tuneless. Almost as
provoking it is, in a quiet way, when three or four quite harmless people
meet under a bedroom window and converse in their usual tone of voice
about their private affairs.

These little gatherings sometimes seem as if they would never break up,
and though the persons in the piece mean no harm, they are nearly as
noxious to sleep as the loud musical water-side rough or public-house
loafer. Dogs, too, like men, seem to feel it incumbent on them to howl
more than usual in hot weather, and to bay the moon with particular
earnestness in July. No enemy of sleep is deadlier than a dear, good,
affectionate dog, whose owners next door have accidentally shut him out.
The whole night long he bewails his loneliness, in accents charged with
profound melancholy. The author of the "Amusement Philosophique" would
have us believe that animals can speak. Nothing makes more for his
opinion than the exquisite variety of lyrical howl in which a shut-out
dog expresses every phrase of blighted affection, incommunicable longing,
and supreme despair. Somehow he never, literally never, wakens his
owners