h, upon
being told that I could get chicken and eggs there whenever I
wanted them, I determined upon venturing. The door being opened
to my knock, I very nearly abandoned my almost blunted purpose; I
never beheld such a den of filth and misery: a woman, the very
image of dirt and disease, held a squalid imp of a baby on her
hip bone while she kneaded her dough with her right fist only
A great lanky girl, of twelve years old, was sitting on a barrel,
gnawing a corn cob; when I made known my business, the woman
answered, "No not I; I got no chickens to sell, nor eggs neither;
but my son will, plenty I expect. Here Nick," (bawling at the
bottom of a ladder), "here's an old woman what wants chickens."
Half a moment brought Nick to the bottom of the ladder, and I
found my merchant was one of a ragged crew, whom I had been used
to observe in my daily walk, playing marbles in the dust, and
swearing lustily; he looked about ten years old.

"Have you chicken to sell, my boy?"

"Yes, and eggs too, more nor what you'll buy."

Having enquired price, condition, and so on, I recollected that I
had been used to give the same price at market, the feathers
plucked, and the chicken prepared for the table, and I told him
that he ought not to charge the same.

"Oh for that, I expect I can fix 'em as well as ever them was,
what you got in market."

"You fix them?"

"Yes to be sure, why not?"

"I thought you were too fond of marbles."

He gave me a keen glance, and said, "You don't know I.--When will
you be wanting the chickens?"

He brought them at the time directed, extremely well "fixed," and
I often dealt with him afterwards. When I paid him, he always
thrust his hand into his breaches pocket, which I presume, as
being _the keep_, was fortified more strongly than the
dilapidated outworks, and drew from thence rather more dollars,
half-dollars, levies, and fips, than his dirty little hand could
well hold. My curiosity was excited, and though I felt an
involuntary disgust towards the young Jew, I repeatedly conversed
with him.

"You are very rich, Nick," I said to him one day, on his making
an ostentatious display of change, as he called it; he sneered
with a most unchildish expression of countenance, and replied, "I
guess 'twould be a bad job for I, if that was all I'd got to
shew."

I asked him how he managed his business. He told me that he
bought eggs by the hundred, and lean chicken by the score, from
the waggo