sudden idea, he pointed to an oil-painting of a
Spanish boy, which stood against the wall, and
told me I might "take the Murillo." I represented
to Jewry that my want was money, not
Murillos; upon which he suggested the
pledging of the Murillo for five pounds. " Dicks'll
do it for you in a minute," Jewry said. " Here
Dicks! " And Dicks presenting himself in the
shape of a very evil-looking clerk, was told to
take "that round the corner," and to bring
five pounds back. Dicks returned in three
minutes without the Murillo, and with three
pounds, which was all, he said, he could get
for it. As Jewry handed me the money, he
said, " About the ticket, now? That's no use to
you! You'll never take the picture out, and if
you did, you wouldn't know what to do with it!
Come; I'll give you ten shillings for the ticket!"
And he did; and eight pounds ten was all I ever
got for my twelve pound bill, which I had to
pay at the end of a month.

But the trial of Jewry which I am now
about to make is of a very different kind. It
involves my leaving behind me my watch and
my purse, my putting on an unobtrusive garb
and a wide-awake hat, my stealing out at the
back gate so as to be unobserved by the servants,
and my making the best of my way to an
adjacent railway station. There, after a minute's
interval, I am picked up by a train all blossoming
with male and female specimens of " Sunday
out," and, after making a circuitous journey,
calling at Kentish Town and Hampstead Heath,
dallying in that Utopia the Camden-road, flitting
from Kingsland to Hackney, glancing at Victoria
Park, and getting a glimpse of distant
masts at Stepney, I am landed at Fenchurch-
street, scud rapidly down Billiter-street and St.
Mary Axe, and, opposite Bishopsgate Church,
into which are crowding the denizens of the
neighbourhood, find my intended companions
awaiting my arrival. Two in number are
my companions; one, Oppenhardt, my friend,
whose innate patrician feelings were outraged by
having allowed himself to come east of Temple
Bar, and who was standing, with an acute expression
of hurt dignity in every feature, contemplating
the back of Inspector Wells, who
was to be our guide in the trial of Jewry which
we were about to make. As I crossed the road,
I looked at those two men and mused, for
twenty seconds by the clock, upon the falsity of
appearances. There was Oppenhardt—whose
paternal grandfather was, I believe, a worthy
German sugar-baker at Hamburg—looking with
his blue great coat, and his black beard, and his
perpetual expansion of nostril, like a peer of the
realm at the very least; and there was Inspector
Wells, a pallid round-faced man, with a light
fringe of whisker, and a sleepy boiled eye, and a
stout idle figure; and yet I believe the Custom
House possesses no clerk having a more acute
knowledge of drawback and rebate, of allowances
and landing-dues, than Oppenhardt; nor
has the City of London Police an officer so sharp
and painstaking, so unwearying and intelligent,
as Inspector Wells. With very few words I
make my companions known to each other, and
then, obedient to the inspector's suggestion, we
cross the road and prepare for our plunge. " It's
going with the stream, gentlemen," says our
guide, "and taking the rough with the smooth.
You've brought nothing of any value with you,
I suppose? Handkerchiefs in an inside pocket, if
you please! You'll soon see why!" " Do they
know you, Wells?" I asked. " Some of 'em, sir;
but not all. I thought of putting on my uniform
coat, but then they'd have made way, and
you'd have seen the place under rather a false
view, perhaps! It's better we should rough it
with the rest."

As he finished his sentence, we turned short
round to the right, up a street called Sandys-
row, and were in the thick of it. Jewry, which
I have come to make trial of, lies in the heart
of the City of London, in the corner of the
angle made by Bishopsgate-street and Houndsditch.
In the midst of it stands a huge black
block of building, for the most part windowless
but crane-bearing, and having odd trap-doors,
some near the roof, some near the basement,
for the swallowing in or giving out of goods.
For this is where the defunct Company which
had its head-quarters in the Street of the Hall
of Lead—the Company which had an army and
a navy of its own, and ruled kings and princes,
but which has now dwindled down into a mere
appanage of Downing-street, and has shrunk
into a " Board"—used in the old days to store
the costly silks which had been brought from
its dominions in the far Ind. This hideous
building was then filled with the rarest specimens
of Eastern handicraft, and looked then
just as it looks now, when, from its appearance,
you would guess that turmeric, or sago, or
starch, or anything equally common-place, was
its contents. Round it seethes and bubbles Jewry,
filling up the very narrow street, with small strips
of pavement on either side, and what ought to
have been a way for vehicles, between them;
every bit of space, however, covered with mob—
dirty, pushing, striving, fighting, high-smelling,
higgling, chaffering, vociferating, laughing mob.
Shops on either side, so far as can be seen above
mob's head; tool-shops, files, saws, adzes, knives,
chisels, hammers, tool-baskets, displayed in the
open windows whence the sashes have been
removed for the better furtherance of trade; doors
open, sellers and buyers hot in altercation,
spirited trade going on. Hatters, hosiers,
tailors, bootmakers' shops, their proprietors
forced by competition to leave the calm asylum
of their counters, and to stand at their doors
uttering wholesome incitement to the passers-by
to become purchasers: not to say importuning
them with familiar blandishments. For, in what
should be the carriage-way is a whole tribe of
peripatetic vendors of hats, hosiery, clothes, and
boots, hook-nosed oleaginous gentry, with ten
pair of trousers over one arm and five coats
over the other; with Brobdingnagian boots (some
with the soles turned uppermost, showing a
perfect armoury of nails), which are carried on a
square piece of board, and which look harder