the acclivity; a youth below, with spade and axe, is supplying three
women with stuff--if women they may be called, who, of all the progeny
of old Mother Nox, seemed most the resemblances of age, misery, and
want; I say _seemed_, for when one was called--one of three--I
beheld, as she raised her dilapidated Dunstable, a face, where beams of
pensive beauty struggled through dusty darkness, and which mantled to a
smile at the sound of notes whistled to the tune of--"In Bunhill-row
there liv'd a Maid"--indicating the approach of Joe--for it was _his
cart:_--the dying cadence now gave way to the gee-up! uttered in deep
bass, accompanied with a smart smack of the whip, to urge the horse up
the ascent. Joe was a decent sort of boy enough for his avocation, not
to be ranked among those who "troop under the sooty flag of Acheron;"
but a clean, square-built fellow, with a broadish face and forehead,
blue eyes, nose rather short, expanded, and inclined upwards, and tinted
with that imperial hue that indicated his knowledge was not confined
to dry measure; this, with a mouth a little elongated, formed a
countenance, upon the whole, full of mirth and good-humour. This piece
of device was surmounted by a hat of the usual professional form--a
domed piece of felt, with a most prodigious margin: he wore a good stout
flannel jacket, and waistcoat; his shirt collar fastened by a leaden
brooch, in the shape of a heart, deviating from the general costume.
His continuations were of white drill; but, mark the vanity! short
enough to display a pair of hoppers, otherwise gaiters, of the same
material; these, with a stout pair of ancle-Johns, completed his
outward man of an order "simply Doric."

At Joe's approach, all was stir and bustle; the pigs, to the third and
fourth generation, moved "in perfect phalanx," not "to the Dorian mood
of flutes and soft recorders," but to their own equally inspiring grunt;
varying from the shrill treble to the deep-toned bass. Jewler, too, ran