le more--mangling-women, washer-women, cobblers,
tailors, chandlers, driving their trades in parlours and kitchens and
back room and garrets, and sometimes all of them under the same
roof--brick-fields skirting gardens paled with staves of old casks, or
timber pillaged from houses burnt down, and blackened and blistered by
the flames--mounds of dock-weed, nettles, coarse grass and
oyster-shells, heaped in rank confusion--small dissenting chapels to
teach, with no lack of illustration, the miseries of Earth, and plenty
of new churches, erected with a little superfluous wealth, to show the
way to Heaven.

At length these streets becoming more straggling yet, dwindled and
dwindled away, until there were only small garden patches bordering the
road, with many a summer house innocent of paint and built of old
timber or some fragments of a boat, green as the tough cabbage-stalks
that grew about it, and grottoed at the seams with toad-stools and
tight-sticking snails. To these succeeded pert cottages, two and two
with plots of ground in front, laid out in angular beds with stiff box
borders and narrow paths between, where footstep never strayed to make
the gravel rough. Then came the public-house, freshly painted in green
and white, with tea-gardens and a bowling green, spurning its old
neighbour with the horse-trough where the waggons stopped; then,
fields; and then, some houses, one by one, of goodly size with lawns,
some even with a lodge where dwelt a porter and his wife. Then came a
turnpike; then fields again with trees and hay-stacks; then, a hill,
and on the top of that, the traveller might stop, and--looking back at
old Saint Paul's looming through the smoke, its cross peeping above the
cloud (if the day were clear), and glittering in the sun; and casting
his eyes upon the Babel out of which it grew until he traced it down to
the furthest outposts of the invading army of bricks and mortar whose
station lay for the present nearly at his feet--might feel at last that
he was clear of London.

Near such a spot as this, and in a pleasant field, the old man and his
little guide (if guide she were, who knew not whither they were bound)
sat down to rest. She had had the precaution to furnish her basket
with some slices of bread and meat, and here they made their frugal
breakfast.

The freshness of the day, the singing of the birds, the beauty of the
waving grass, the deep green leaves, the wild flowers, and the thousan