humbug, here. Still there may be some good
in it. I helped to make that grand sheriff's
coach, and received a fair day's pay for a fair
day's labour. There might be surely, and
advantageously, a little less gold on yonder
coats and carriages, and a little more in the
pockets of myself, and of my mates; but
still, should my son Tom ever become Field
Marshal Smith, or my son John Lord
Chancellor Brown, it will do me no harm to see
them wear gold coats, and ride in gold coaches
too. Who knows? They 're wondrous quick
at learning. At which reflection the labour-
beaten faces clear up, and the placid grins
expand into a joyous guffaw, as a
costermonger's cart, which has sprung from no
man knows where, and of which the driver
wears the most hopeless expression of being
out of his element that ever costermonger
wore, is made to curvet and to oscillate, to
back and to advance, by infuriate policemen;
who know as little what to do with it as does
the driver himself; and, seeing that the up line
and down line of carriages in all the streets
are all crowded, can only menace him with
their staves in a vague manner, and make
sudden feints of arresting him, and dragging
him off to a chimerical Greenyard. How are
they to get him there?

Meanwhile, I have had my fill of the Court
of Saint James's; and, sunning myself in what
I have seen—with the fanfare of the trumpets
still in my ears, with the diamonds yet
glittering, the plumes yet waving, the
beautiful English faces yet sparkling before
me—I creep back to my court in the parish of
Saint Crapulens. If the reader likes, I will
take him with me.

To Slaughterhouse Court. Low Lane, Saint
Crapulens. Walk up the court, pray. Observe
the dirt; also the smells. Walk inside.
Observe a repetition of the dirt and the smells.
Look at the people. Examine the children.
Look at (but don't drink) the water, where
there is any. I live here.

Why do I live here ? It may be that I am
a philosopher, an author dwelling up a court
like Goldsmith or Johnson in solitude, total
idleness, and "the pride of literature." It
may be that I have nowhere else to live—
that I have never possessed in my life half-a-
dozen shirts, an umbrella, or a home. That
I never was respectable. That I am one of
the rabble—the lower classes—the inferior
orders. That my father's name was Rag,
and his father being Tag, I am Bobtail. Be
it as it may, I live here.

Goodness knows who built Slaughterhorse
Court; or, indeed, Calf Alley close by (leading
into Bleeding-knife Yard); what sort of a
man could he have been, so devoid of common
sense, of common charity, to build, or to
counsel the building of such a hole as this?
It must always have been a hole. If every
arrangement for dirt, discomfort, misery, and
wretchedness had been systematic, organised,
deliberately meditated, and carried out as a
good joke, or a moral lesson, or for any object
with malice prepense or aforethought by the
architect, he could not have succeeded better.
Slaughterhorse Court was built before there
was gas; but the builder seems to have
contemplated the possibility of such a invention;
for he has rendered it almost impossible to
erect gas lamps or to lay gas on. He has made
little preventive nooks and corners, walls
and beams to burk the laying on of water, to
crush sewerage, to counteract the simplest
measures of ventilation. He must have hated
his species, this builder; he must have howled
with joy to do them a mischief, to build this
infernal spider's web for human flies to be
tortured in.

I am not afraid to speak my mind. It is a
hole, it is a spider's web. It is an uncovered
sewer with an anthill burrowing in it. There
is a rogue, though, who snuffs up its fetid
atmosphere, as though it were laden with
all the perfumes of Araby the blest. He
takes care, however, not to live up our court,
He lives on it. On stated days you may
see him stop at the corner of Slaughterhorse
Court and Low Lane, in a little
wickerwork chaise, drawn by a fat, sleek-
coated, vicious poney. He is an ill-looking
man, with a double chin grovelling in the
folds of an ill-washed neckcloth. He has fat
hands, on which the starched end of his
wristbands makes a mark, and of which the
nails are in half-mourning. I never knew a
good man to have hands like those. He is
the landlord.

This fellow, fattening on the rents he
grinds out of us poor courtiers, lives in a
pleasant house at Highgate; a little gem of a
cottage where there is ivy, and lilac, and
geranium; where the odours of hay-ricks float
on the air with golden wings; a little sweet-
smelling eyrie on a high hill, which stands
nodding familiarly to Hampstead, winking
confidentially to Hornsey; but regarding with
a supercilious stare of astonishment the great
smoking, steaming giant of a city with a
cupola-shaped hat and a ball and cross at the
top, just as a fresh country lass, new from
gathering primroses, would stare at a big,
swart, grimy ballast-heaver drinking his
thirteenth pint of beer after a hard day's
walk alongside the "Maria Jane." Does he
ever think, this double-chinned earthworm,
grovelling in a honeysuckled summer-house
in his slip of a garden, moistening his wicked
old clay with beeswinged port, and smoking
his comfortable pipe,—does he ever think on
the quiet summer Sunday evenings, while
watching the swallows wending their way to
and fro the great city in the distance, that there
is not a little bird among them but might
be the bearer of a message of wrath and
vengeance to him from Slaughterhorse Court;
where the filthy houses he lets, and persists
in letting, and in conniving at sub-letting and
in refusing to improve, are so noisome, so
infected, so hideous that the swallows will not