manufacturing scavengers: they clear away refuse
which would else encumber the ground, and
they put money into the pockets both of
buyers and sellers; they do effectually create
a something out of a commercial nothing.

How to save a penny by using dairy drainage,
and slaughterhouse drainage, and stable
drainage, and street drainage, and house
drainage, and old bones, and old rags, and
spent tan, and flax steep-water—how to create
value by using such refuse as manure for
fields and gardens—is one of the great
questions of the day, which no one who takes
up a newspaper can fail to find elucidated in
some form or other. Chemistry is here the
grand economiser. Chemistry is indeed
Nature's housewife, making the best of
everything. "The clippings of the travelling
tinker," as Dr. Playfair well says in one of his
lectures, "are mixed with the parings of
horses' hoofs from the smithy, or the cast-off
woollen garments of the inhabitants of a sister
isle, and soon afterwards, in the form of dyes
of brightest blue, grace the dress of courtly
dames. The main ingredient of the ink with
which I now write was possibly once part of
the broken hoop of an old beer barrel. The
bones of dead animals yield the chief
constituent of lucifer matches. The dregs of
port wine—carefully rejected by the port
wine drinker in decanting his favourite
beverage—are taken by him in the morning,
in the form of Seidlitz powders, to remove the
effects of his debauch. The offal of the streets
and the washings of coal-gas re-appear
carefully preserved in the lady's smelling bottle,
or are used by her to flavour blanc mange for
her friends."

PHASES OF " PUBLIC " LIFE.

IN THREE CHAPTERS—CHAPTER THE THIRD.

SHOULD the readers of this journal have
formed or expressed any opinion on the
subject of Barclay's Dray, formerly herein
adverted to,* I should not wonder if they opined
that the wheels of that vehicle stood grievously
in need of lubricating; inasmuch as the
spokes and axles thereof have ceased revolving
for some time; a dead lock being thereby
created, and a crowded literary thoroughfare
blocked up. Weighty and sufficient reasons
are not wanting to be alleged in excuse for this
temporary stoppage. The writer could, if he
chose, plead as many pleas as the defendant
in an action at law—from "never indebted,"
to "leave and license;" yet he is of opinion
that it would be far more graceful and
respectful in him to follow the example of that
Mayor of Boulogne, who, of the four-and-
twenty sufficient reasons he had provided
to account for the non-firing of a salute
to Henry the Eighth, put forward as the
first reason, that he had no gunpowder. So
I may say, humbly, that the third chapter
of this essay was not sooner printed, because
it was not written;—a thoroughly logical and
conclusive reason, reminding me of the
Spanish fleet, which could not be seen,
because it was not in sight: or, to come nearer
home, of some worthy men—Conservatives,
ratepayers, vestrymen, and other residents
of a country town I know, who petitioned
lately against the introduction of gas-lamps
into the streets ; for which they alleged as a
reason—not that gas was atheistical, or
papistical, or subversive of Church and State
—but solely that, as they expressed it with
beautiful simplicity ''they didn't want no
gas."

*In pages 224 and 250 of our Fifth Volume.

The world has grown older, and the
Registrar-General has written a good many
columns in the Times, since we sat in the dray
together among the beer-barrels. The May sun
was shining and the birds were singing, when
I sat down to write chapter the first; but
now, as I bend over chapter the third, the
trees are strewing dead leaves on the grave of
summer, and the October blast moans
lamentably through the branches as though it
were a dog, howling by night before a house
for the year that is to die.

The public life of Israel; Judaical
conviviality; that shall be my theme. The publics
used by the peculiar people are marked with
distinctive characteristics, like everything else
appertaining to that curious race. When
Holywell Street was more old clothesy than
literary; and, when children of the Tribes
lay in wait at the shop doors behind cloaks and
paletots, like wild beasts in ambush, frousy
little public-houses nestled among the old
clothes shops pretty numerously. They were
not cheerful nor gaily decorated establishments.
Mostly with semi-circular counters,
mostly without forms or settles (for it is a
peculiarity of the "persuasion" to take its
refreshment almost invariably standing): they
smelt intolerably of stale tobacco-smoke—that
of bad cigars which the landlord and his
customers continually smoked. No pipes were
ever seen and no cigar-cases or cigar-boxes
were ever produced. All smoked cigars, yet
no man ever seemed to light a fresh "weed,"
but kept on, from morn to dewy eve,
continuously puffing at the same stump or fag-
end of rolled tobacco or cabbage, or lettuce
leaf, as the case might be. They appeared to
possess some magical property of indefinite
prolongation.

The Jews' Harp stood somewhere between
Old Castle Street, Holywell Street, and
Lyon Inn. There was an old clothes shop,
wholesale, retail, and for exportation on either
side. Early in the morning, winter and summer,
the gentlemen clothesmen of the vicinity
called in for a cigar before they started on
their habiliment-collecting rounds. Liquor
they never consumed before business, and they
even went trust (till the afternoon) for the
cigar: it being a maxim among the people
never to part with money, where disbursement