with wings should have got to the pass that it hops
contentedly down a ladder into a cellar, and calls _that_ going home, is
a circumstance so amazing as to leave one nothing more in this
connexion to wonder at." One of his illustrations is a reduced Bantam
family in the Hackney-road deriving their sole enjoyment from crowding
together in a pawnbroker's side-entry; but seeming as if only newly come
down in the world, and always in a feeble flutter of fear that they may
be found out. He contrasts them with others. "I know a low fellow,
originally of a good family from Dorking, who takes his whole
establishment of wives, in single file, in at the door of the Jug
Department of a disorderly tavern near the Haymarket, manoeuvres them
among the company's legs, emerges with them at the Bottle Entrance, and
so passes his life: seldom, in the season, going to bed before two in
the morning. . . . But, the family I am best acquainted with, reside in the
densest part of Bethnal-green. Their abstraction from the objects among
which they live, or rather their conviction that those objects have all
come into existence in express subservience to fowls, has so enchanted
me, that I have made them the subject of many journeys at divers hours.
After careful observation of the two lords and the ten ladies of whom
this family consists, I have come to the conclusion that their opinions
are represented by the leading lord and leading lady: the latter, as I
judge, an aged personage, afflicted with a paucity of feather and
visibility of quill that gives her the appearance of a bundle of office
pens. When a railway goods-van that would crush an elephant comes round
the corner, tearing over these fowls, they emerge unharmed from under
the horses, perfectly satisfied that the whole rush was a passing
property in the air, which may have left something to eat behind it.
They look upon old shoes, wrecks of kettles and saucepans, and
fragments of bonnets, as a kind of meteoric discharge, for fowls to peck
at. . . . Gaslight comes quite as natural to them as any other light; and I
have more than a suspicion that, in the minds of the two lords, the
early public-house at the corner has superseded the sun. They always
begin to crow when the public-house shutters begin to be taken down, and
they salute the Potboy, the instant he appears to perform that duty, as
if he were Phoebes in person." For the truth of the personal adventure
in the same essay, which he