ry like the
women among whom they live. They seem to turn out of their unwholesome
beds into the street, without any preparation. They leave their young
families to stagger about the gutters, unassisted, while they frouzily
quarrel and swear and scratch and spit at street corners. In particular,
I remark that when they are about to increase their families (an event
of frequent recurrence) the resemblance is strongly expressed in a
certain dusty dowdiness down-at-heel self-neglect, and general giving up
of things. I cannot honestly report that I have ever seen a feline
matron of this class washing her face when in an interesting condition.

Not to prolong these notes of uncommercial travel among the lower
animals of shy neighbourhoods by dwelling at length upon the exasperated
moodiness of the tom-cats and their resemblance in many respects to a
man and a brother, I will come to a close with a word on the fowls of
the same localities.

That anything born of an egg and invested 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. Otherwise I might wonder at the
completeness with which these fowls have become separated from all the
birds of the air--have taken to grovelling in bricks and mortar and
mud--have forgotten all about live trees and make roosting-places of
shop-boards, barrows, oyster-tubs, bulk-heads, and door-scrapers. I
wonder at nothing concerning them, and take them as they are. I accept
as products of nature and things of course a reduced Bantam family of my
acquaintance in the Hackney Road, who are incessantly at the
pawnbroker's. I cannot say that they enjoy themselves, for they are of a
melancholy temperament; but what enjoyment they are capable of they
derive from crowding together in the pawnbroker's side-entry. Here, they
are always to be found in a feeble flutter, as if they were newly come
down in the world, and were afraid of being identified. 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. Over Waterloo Bridge there is a shabby old speckled
couple (they belong to the wooden French-b