I keep a shop in the City, and open it every morning as Bow Church
bells are ringing out eight o'clock. I pay a very heavy rent, as well
as Queen's taxes and poor's-rates; and I could do neither, to say
nothing of maintaining my family, if I did not mind my business, and
work hard. But by the help of constant attention and industry, I am
happy to say, I am able to make my shop keep me and my family too,
which it does comfortably, and lifts me, in some sort, above the
world, and enables me to bear the character, which I should always
like to retain, of a respectable man.

We dwellers in London City proper are supposed to entertain a very
high regard for respectability, and so we do; and I am going now to
detail the operations of what, I suppose, must be called an
institution altogether peculiar to the City, of which the world out of
the City knows very little, and which has been in being I don't know
how many centuries--before there were any poor-laws, or any 'good
Queen Bess;' and which must have been a respectable affair--if I am
any judge of what that means--from the very first, whenever that was.
It is a good thing to relieve necessity in any shape, and a better
thing to help it to help itself; but to dispense charity without doing
a mischief in some way or other, either by rewarding imposture,
encouraging idleness, or repressing the springs of self-reliance or
self-exertion, is about the hardest business I have ever had to do
with, and I have had some knotty affairs to get through in my time.
Now, the various wards of the City do every year, I think, manage this
difficult matter very carefully and efficiently, though not without a
good deal of trouble; and as I think their mode of doing it sets a
good example, I have made up my mind to let the public know something
about the Inquest for the Poor, which comes off in December every
year. I believe it will be a novelty to most people out of the City
limits, and to not a few within them as well. What I know about it, I
have derived from experience: that, indeed, is all I have to relate;
and when I have told my tale, the reader will be as wise as I am, in
this respect at least.

About the middle of last December, I received a citation to attend a
wardmote, to be held in the schoolroom of my parish. I was in
expectation of this summons, as, the parishioners being called upon in
rotation, I knew that my turn would come on upon this occasion. The
number of tradesmen,