n at the opposite street corner.

We were occupied in this manner the other day, endeavouring to fit a pair
of lace-up half-boots on an ideal personage, for whom, to say the truth,
they were full a couple of sizes too small, when our eyes happened to
alight on a few suits of clothes ranged outside a shop-window, which it
immediately struck us, must at different periods have all belonged to,
and been worn by, the same individual, and had now, by one of those
strange conjunctions of circumstances which will occur sometimes, come to
be exposed together for sale in the same shop. The idea seemed a
fantastic one, and we looked at the clothes again with a firm
determination not to be easily led away. No, we were right; the more we
looked, the more we were convinced of the accuracy of our previous
impression. There was the man's whole life written as legibly on those
clothes, as if we had his autobiography engrossed on parchment before us.

The first was a patched and much-soiled skeleton suit; one of those
straight blue cloth cases in which small boys used to be confined, before
belts and tunics had come in, and old notions had gone out: an ingenious
contrivance for displaying the full symmetry of a boy's figure, by
fastening him into a very tight jacket, with an ornamental row of buttons
over each shoulder, and then buttoning his trousers over it, so as to
give his legs the appearance of being hooked on, just under the armpits.
This was the boy's dress. It had belonged to a town boy, we could see;
there was a shortness about the legs and arms of the suit; and a bagging
at the knees, peculiar to the rising youth of London streets. A small
day-school he had been at, evidently. If it had been a regular boys'
school they wouldn't have let him play on the floor so much, and rub his
knees so white. He had an indulgent mother too, and plenty of halfpence,
as the numerous smears of some sticky substance about the pockets, and
just below the chin, which even the salesman's skill could not succeed in
disguising, sufficiently betokened. They were decent people, but not
overburdened with riches, or he would not have so far outgrown the suit
when he passed into those corduroys with the round jacket; in which he
went to a boys' school, however, and learnt to write--and in ink of
pretty tolerable blackness, too, if the place where he used to wipe his
pen might be taken as evidence.

A black suit and the jacket changed into a dimin