your neighbours; and I never yet heard of any one who
tried. It has been my fortune, in this anonymous
accidental way, to watch more than one of these downward
travellers for some stages on the road to ruin. One man
must have been upwards of sixty before I first observed
him, and he made then a decent, personable figure in
broad-cloth of the best. For three years he kept falling
- grease coming and buttons going from the square-skirted
coat, the face puffing and pimpling, the shoulders
growing bowed, the hair falling scant and grey upon his
head; and the last that ever I saw of him, he was
standing at the mouth of an entry with several men in
moleskin, three parts drunk, and his old black raiment
daubed with mud. I fancy that I still can hear him
laugh. There was something heart-breaking in this
gradual declension at so advanced an age; you would have
thought a man of sixty out of the reach of these
calamities; you would have thought that he was niched by
that time into a safe place in life, whence he could pass
quietly and honourably into the grave.

One of the earliest marks of these DEGRINGOLADES is,
that the victim begins to disappear from the New Town
thoroughfares, and takes to the High Street, like a
wounded animal to the woods. And such an one is the type
of the quarter. It also has fallen socially. A
scutcheon over the door somewhat jars in sentiment where
there is a washing at every window. The old man, when I
saw him last, wore the coat in which he had played the
gentleman three years before; and that was just what gave