and departing with a return cargo of what
looked like rubbish and street-sweepings. No other commerce seemed to
exist, except, possibly, a girl might offer you a pair of stockings or a
worked collar, or a man whisper something mysterious about wonderfully
cheap cigars. And yet I remember seeing female hucksters in those regions,
with their wares on the edge of the sidewalk and their own seats right in
the carriage-way, pretending to sell half-decayed oranges and apples,
toffy, Ormskirk cakes, combs and cheap jewelry, the coarsest kind of
crockery, and little plates of oysters,--knitting patiently all day long,
and removing their undiminished stock in trade at nightfall. All
indispensable importations from other quarters of the town were on a
remarkably diminutive scale: for example, the wealthier inhabitants
purchased their coal by the wheelbarrow-load, and the poorer ones by the
peck-measure. It was a curious and melancholy spectacle, when an overladen
coal-cart happened to pass through the street and drop a handful or two of
its burden in the mud, to see half a dozen women and children scrambling
for the treasure-trove, like a dock of hens and chickens gobbling up some
spilt corn. In this connection I may as well mention a commodity of boiled
snails (for such they appeared to me, though probably a marine production)
which used to be peddled from door to door, piping hot, as an article of
cheap nutriment.

The population of these dismal abodes appeared to consider the side-walks
and middle of the street as their common hall. In a drama of low life, the
unity of place might be arranged rigidly according to the classic rule,
and the street be the one locality in which every scene and incident
should occur. Courtship, quarrels, plot and counterplot, conspiracies for
robbery and murder, family difficulties or agreements,--all such matters,
I doubt not, are constantly discussed or transacted in this sky-roofed
saloon, so regally hung with its sombre canopy of coal-smoke. Whatever the
disadvantages of the English climate, the only comfortable or wholesome
part of life, for the city-poor, must be spent in the open air. The
stifled and squalid rooms where they lie down at night, whole families and
neighborhoods together, or sulkily elbow one another in the day-time, when
a settled rain drives them within doors, are worse horrors than it is
worth while (without a practical object in view) to admit into one's
imagination. No won