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-bedstead, washingstand, and
towel-horse-making trade) who are always trying to get in at the door of
a chapel. Whether the old lady, under a delusion reminding one of Mrs.
Southcott, has an idea of entrusting an egg to that particular
denomination, or merely understands that she has no business in the
building and is consequently frantic to enter it, I cannot determine;
but she is constantly endeavouring to undermine the principal door;
while her partner, who is infirm upon his legs, walks up and down,
encouraging her and defying the Universe. But the family I have been
best acquainted with, since the removal from this trying sphere of a
Chinese circle at Brentford, reside in the densest part of Bethnal
Green. Their abstraction from the objects among which they live, or
rather their conviction that those objects have all come into existence
in express subservience to fowls, has so enchanted me that I have made
them the subject of many journeys at divers hours. After careful
observation of the two lords and the ten ladies of whom this family
consists, I have come to the conclusion that their opinions are
represented by the leading lord and leading lady: the latter, as I
judge, an aged personage, afflicted with a paucity of feathers and
visibility of quill, that gives her the appearance of a bundle of
office-pens. When a railway goods van that would crush an elephant comes
round the corner, tearing over these fowls, they emerge unharmed from
under the horses, perfectly satisfied that the whole rush was a passing
property in the air, which may have left something to eat behind it.
They look upon old shoes, wrecks of kettles and saucepans, and fragments
of bonnets, as a kind of meteoric discharge, for fowls to peck at.
Peg-tops and hoops they account, I think, as a sort of hail;