question, " Have you anything to shell,
sir?"

The interrogatory may have been put in
Kensington, and you may live at Mile-end;
but the bagless clothesman will not be deterred
by any question of distance from accompanying
you. He would walk by your side from
Indus to the Pole, with that peculiar sidling,
shuffling gait of his, on the bare chance of the
reversion of a single pair of pantaloons. And,
should you so far yield to his seductive
entreaties as to summon him to your domicile,
he will produce, with magical rapidity, from
some unknown receptacle, a BAG—when, or
where, or whence, or how obtained, it is not
within the compass of human ken to know.

A marvellous article is that bag. It will
hold everything and anything: always stuffed
to repletion, it will hold more. The last straw,
it has been aphoristically observed, breaks the
camel's back; but trusses of trousers, stacks
of paletôts, ricks of waistcoats, thrust into
this much-enduring bag, seem not to tax its
powers of endurance to anything above a
moderate degree. As to breaking the bag's
back, it is far more likely that it would
dislocate the dorsal vertebræ of any novice bold
enough to carry it than its own.

A friend of mine met with a bagless
clothesman on the Queen's highway, and in
his habit as he lived. Being about to leave
London, he acknowledged the soft impeachment
of having a few old clothes to dispose
of, and of which he thought he might as
well make a few shillings. Trousers, waistcoats,
and coats were produced, and passed in
review, and then my friend yielded to a
Machiavelic suggestion of the clothesman
relative to old boots. Remembering the existence
of a dilapidated pair of Wellingtons under the
parlour sofa, he descended to fetch them,
leaving—infelix puer !—the clothesman alone.
He reascended: the usual chaffering, bickering,
and eventual bargain-driving took place.
The money agreed on was paid, and the
clothesman departed. But—oh duplicity of
clothesmankind!—the nefarious Israelite had
stuffed into his bag the only pair of evening
dress continuations my friend possessed.
There was likewise a blue satin handkerchief
with a white spot—what is popularly, I
believe, known as a bird's-eye fogle—which
was missing; and though, of course, I would
not insinuate anything to the disadvantage of
the carriers of the bag, the disappearance
will be allowed to be strange. Mrs. Gumm,
however, my friend's landlady, (who has
sheltered so many medical students beneath
her roof that she may almost be considered
a member of the profession, and who reads
the " Lancet " on Sunday afternoons with
quite a relish), Mrs. Gumm now stoutly
avers that he did annex them; declaring, in
addition, her firm belief that he appropriated
at the same time, and stowed away in his bag,
a feather-bed of considerable size, and a miniature
portrait of the Otaheitan chief who was
supposed to have eaten a portion of
Captain Cook: which portrait was presented to
her by the Rev. Fugue Trumpetstop, an
earnest man, and now minister of finance to
King Kamehameha XXXIII. of the Sandwich
Islands. I think that if there had been a
chest of drawers or a four-post bed missing,
the dealer in decayed apparel would have been
suspected as the spoliator.

Carrying the bag, and crying " oghclo!"
seems a sort of novitiate, or apprenticeship,
which all Hebrews are subjected to. They
can flesh their maiden swords in the streets,
without its being at all considered derogatory.
I please myself with the theory, sometimes,
that of the millionnaires I see rolling by in
carriages; read of as giving magnificent balls
and suppers; hear of as the pillars of
commerce and the girders of public credit; many
have in their youth passed through the dusky
probation of the bag. Keen chaffering about
ragged paletôts and threadbare trousers
prepared them, finished them, gave them a
sharper edge for the negotiation of the little
bill and the sale of the undoubted specimens
of the old masters. And from these to
millions there were but few steps. There is
a dear old dirty, frowsy, picturesque, muddy,
ill-paved, worse-lighted, immensely rich old
street in Frankfort, called the " Judenstrasse,"
a sort of compound of the worst parts of Duke's
Place and St. Mary Axe, and the best parts
of Petticoat Lane, and Church Lane, St. Giles's.
Here dwell the Jews of Frankfort—as dirty,
as frowsy, and as wealthy as their abiding-
place. Departing at morn, and returning at
eve, with the never-failing bag, you may see
the young Israelites; sitting at the doors,
smoking their pipes in tranquillity, are the
patriarchs; gossiping at the windows are the
daughters of Judah, in robes of rainbow-hued
silks or satins, but with under-garments of
equivocal whiteness; sprawling in the gutters
amidst old clothes, pots, pans, household
furniture, and offal, are the bright-eyed
little children. I like much to walk in the
Judenstrasse (after a good dinner at the
Hôtel de Russie), smoking the pipe of peace
and Hungarian tobacco; glancing now at the
old clothes, now at the clothesmen; now at
the little babies in the kennel—peeping
cunningly at the heavy iron-stanchioned doors
and the windows, protected at night (and for
reasons, the rogues!) with iron-bound shutters.
I conjecture how many colossal fortunes have
been made out of that shabby, grubby, ill-
smelling old street. How many latent
Rothschilds there may be in its back attics; how
many Sampayos yet to come are sprawling
in its kennels! The discipline of the bag is
well observed in the Judenstrasse, and
prospers as it does everywhere else.

And this only brings me back to my starting
point, and makes me perplexed, confused,
bothered. Why should the Jews deal in old
clothes? Not only in London or Frankfort:
who has not heard the nasal chant of the