whereat he is now standing. All education was unknown to him, so was all
love. In those festive haunts at St. Giles's where he who would see
"life in London" may often discover the boy who has held his horse in the
morning dancing merrily with his chosen damsel at night, our sweeper's
character was austere as Charles the Twelfth's. And the poor creature
had his good qualities. He was sensitively alive to kindness,--little
enough had been shown him to make the luxury the more prized from its
rarity! Though fond of money, he would part with it (we do not say
cheerfully, but part with it still),--not to mere want, indeed (for he
had been too pinched and starved himself, and had grown too obtuse to
pinching and to starving for the sensitiveness that prompts to charity),
but to any of his companions who had done him a good service, or who had
even warmed his dull heart by a friendly smile. He was honest, too,--
honest to the backbone. You might have trusted him with gold untold.
Through the heavy clod which man's care had not moulded, nor books
enlightened, nor the priest's solemn lore informed, still natural rays
from the great parent source of Deity struggled, fitful and dim. He had
no lawful name; none knew if sponsors had ever stood security for his
sins at the sacred fount. But he had christened himself by the strange,
unchristian like name of "Beck." There he was, then, seemingly without
origin, parentage, or kindred tie,--a lonesome, squalid, bloodless thing,
which the great monster, London, seemed to have spawned forth of its own
self; one of its sickly, miserable, rickety offspring, whom it puts out
at nurse to Penury, at school to Starvation, and, finally, and literally,
gives them stones for bread, with the option of the gallows or the
dunghill when the desperate offspring calls on the giant mother for
return and home.

And this creature did love something,--loved, perhaps, some fellow-being;
of that hereafter, when we dive into the secrets of his privacy.