know, and the admiration of all surrounding
nations and succeeding ages, I do not doubt, but
perhaps a little the better now and then for being
pricked up to its work. Turning off into Old
Palace-yard, the Courts of Law kept me company
for a quarter of an hour; hinting in low whispers
what numbers of people they were keeping
awake, and how intensely wretched and
horrible they were rendering the small hours to
unfortunate suitors. Westminster Abbey was
fine gloomy society for another quarter of an
hour; suggesting a wonderful procession of its
dead among the dark arches and pillars, each
century more amazed by the century following
it than by all the centuries going before. And
indeed in those houseless night walks—which
even included cemeteries where watchmen
went round among the graves at stated times,
and moved the tell-tale handle of an index
which recorded that they had touched it at
such an hour—it was a solemn consideration
what enormous hosts of dead belong to one old
great city, and how, if they were raised while the
living slept, there would not be the space of a
pin's point in all the streets and ways for the
living to come out into. Not only that, but the
vast armies of dead would overflow the hills and
valleys beyond the city, and would stretch away
all round it, God knows how far: seemingly, to
the confines of the earth.

When a church clock strikes, on houseless
ears in the dead of the night, it may be at first
mistaken for company and hailed as such. But,
as the spreading circles of vibration, which you
may perceive at such a time with great clearness,
go opening out, for ever and ever afterwards
widening perhaps (as the philosopher has
suggested) in eternal space, the mistake is
rectified and the sense of loneliness is profounder.
Once—it was after leaving the Abbey and turning
my face north—I came to the great steps
of Saint Martin's church as the clock was
striking Three. Suddenly, a thing that in a
moment more I should have trodden upon without
seeing, rose up at my feet with a cry of loneliness
and houselessness, struck out of it by the
bell, the like of which I never heard. We then
stood face to face looking at one another,
frightened by one another. The creature was
like a beetle-browed hair-lipped youth of twenty,
and it had a loose bundle of rags on, which it
held together with one of its hands. It shivered
from head to foot, and its teeth chattered, and
as it stared at me—persecutor, devil, ghost,
whatever it thought me—it made with its
whining mouth as if it were snapping at me,
like a worried dog. Intending to give this ugly
object, money, I put out my hand to stay it
—for it recoiled as it whined and snapped—
and laid my hand upon its shoulder. Instantly,
it twisted out of its garment, like the young man
in the New Testament, and left me standing
alone with its rags in my hand.

Covent-garden Market, when it was market
morning, was wonderful company. The great
waggons of cabbages, with growers' men and
boys lying asleep under them, and with sharp
dogs from market-garden neighbourhoods looking
after the whole, were as good as a party.
But one of the worst night sights I know in
London, is to be found in the children who
prowl about this place; who sleep in the baskets,
fight for the offal, dart at any object they think
they can lay their thieving hands on, dive under
the carts and barrows, dodge the constables,
and are perpetually making a blunt pattering on
the pavement of the Piazza with the rain of
their naked feet. A painful and unnatural
result comes of the comparison one is forced to
institute between the. growth of corruption as
displayed in the so much improved and cared
for fruits of the earth, and the growth of corruption
as displayed in these all uncared for (except
inasmuch as ever-hunted) savages.

There was early coffee to be got about Covent-
garden Market, and that was more company—
warm company, too, which was better. Toast
of a very substantial quality, was likewise
procurable: though the towzled-headed man who
made it, in an inner chamber within the coffee
room, hadn't got his coat on yet, and was so
heavy with sleep that in every interval of toast
and coffee he went off anew behind the partition
into complicated cross-roads of choke and
snore, and lost his way directly. Into one of
these establishments (among the earliest) near
Bow-street, there came, one morning as I sat
over my houseless cup, pondering where to go
next, a man in a high and long snuff-coloured
coat, and shoes, and, to the best of my belief,
nothing else but a hat, who took out of his hat
a large cold meat pudding; a meat pudding so
large that it was a very tight fit, and brought
the lining of the hat out with it. This
mysterious man was known by his pudding, for, on
his entering, the man of sleep brought him a
pint of hot tea, a small loaf, and a large knife and
fork and plate. Left to himself in his box, he
stood the pudding on the bare table, and, instead
of cutting it, stabbed it, over-hand, with the
knife, like a mortal enemy; then took the knife
out, wiped it on his sleeve, tore the pudding
asunder with his fingers, and ate it all up. The
remembrance of this man with the pudding
remains with me as the remembrance of the most
spectral person my houselessness encountered.
Twice only was I in that establishment, and
twice I saw him stalk in (as I should say, just out
of bed, and presently going back to bed), take
out his pudding, stab his pudding, wipe the
dagger, and eat his pudding all up. He was a
man whose figure promised cadaverousness, but
who had an excessively red face, though shaped
like a horse's. On the second occasion of my
seeing him, he said, huskily, to the man of sleep,
"Am I red to-night?" " You are," he
uncompromisingly answered. "My mother," said the
spectre, " was a red-faced woman that liked
drink, and I looked at her hard when she laid
in her coffin, and I took the complexion."
Somehow, the pudding seemed an unwholesome
pudding after that, and I put myself in its way
no more.

"When there was no market, or when I wanted