ng down, going out, and
coming home tired at sunrise. "My last special feat was turning out of
bed at two, after a hard day pedestrian and otherwise, and walking
thirty miles into the country to breakfast." One description he did not
give in his paper, but I recollect his saying that he had seldom seen
anything so striking as the way in which the wonders of an equinoctial
dawn (it was the 15th of October 1857) presented themselves during that
walk. He had never before happened to see night so completely at odds
with morning, "which was which." Another experience of his night
ramblings used to be given in vivid sketches of the restlessness of a
great city, and the manner in which _it_ also tumbles and tosses before
it can get to sleep. Nor should anyone curious about his habits and ways
omit to accompany him with his Tramps into Gadshill lanes; or to follow
him into his Shy Neighbourhoods of the Hackney-road, Waterloo-road,
Spitalfields, or Bethnal-green. For delightful observation both of
country and town, for the wit that finds analogies between remote and
familiar things, and for humorous personal sketches and experience,
these are perfect of their kind.

"I have my eye upon a piece of Kentish road, bordered on either side by
a wood, and having on one hand, between the road-dust and the trees, a
skirting patch of grass. Wild flowers grow in abundance on this spot,
and it lies high and airy, with a distant river stealing steadily away
to the ocean, like a man's life. To gain the mile-stone here, which the
moss, primroses, violets, blue-bells, and wild roses, would soon render
illegible but for peering travellers pushing them aside with their
sticks, you must come up a steep hill, come which way you may. So, all
the tramps with carts or caravans--the Gipsy-tramp, the Show-tramp, the
Cheap Jack--find it impossible to resist the temptations of the place;
and all turn the horse loose when they come to it, and boil the pot.
Bless the place, I love the ashes of the vagabond fires that have
scorched its grass!" It was there he found Dr. Marigold, and Chops the
Dwarf, and the White-haired Lady with the pink eyes eating meat-pie with
the Giant. So, too, in his Shy Neighbourhoods, when he relates his
experiences of the bad company that birds are fond of, and of the effect
upon domestic fowls of living in low districts, his method of handling
the subject has all the charm of a discovery. "That anything born of an
egg and invested