the matutinal huckster may be seen administering to costermongers, hackney-coachmen, and “fair women without discretion,” a fluid “all hot, all hot,” ycleped by the initiated elder wine, which, we should think, might give the partakers a tolerable notion of the fermenting beverage extracted by Tartars from mare’s milk not particularly fresh.  Hard by we find a decent matron super-intending her tea-table at the lamp-post, and tendering to a remarkably select company little, blue, delft cups of bohea, filled from time to time from a prodigious kettle, that simmers unceasingly on its charcoal tripod, though the refractory cad often protests that the fuel fails before the boiling stage is consummated by an ebullition.  Hither approaches perhaps an interesting youth from Magherastaphena, who, ere night-fall, is destined to figure in some police-office as a “juvenile delinquent.”  The shivering sweep, who has just travelled through half a dozen stacks of chimneys, also quickens every motion of his weary little limbs, when he comes within sight of the destined breakfast, and beholds the reversionary heel of a loaf and roll of butter awaiting his arrival.  Another unfailing visiter is the market-gardener, on his way to deposit before the Covent Garden piazza such a pyramid of cabbages as might well have been manured in the soil with Master Jack’s justly celebrated bean-stalk.  Surely Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.  The female portion of such assemblages, for the most part, consists of poor Salopian strawberry-carriers, many of whom have walked already at least four miles, with a troublesome burden, and for a miserable pittance—­egg-women, with sundry still-born chickens, goslings, and turkey-pouts—­and passing milk-maidens, peripatetic under the yoke of their double pail.  Their professional cry is singular and sufficiently unintelligible, although perhaps not so much so as that of the Dublin milk-venders in the days of Swift; it used to run thus,—­

“Mugs, jugs, and porringers,
Up in the garret and down in the cellar.”

They are in general a hale, comely, well-favoured race, notwithstanding the assertion of the author of Trivia to the contrary.[5]

[5] “On doors the sallow milk maid chalks her gains. 
Oh! how unlike the milk-maid of the plains!”

The most revolting spectacle to any one of sensibility which usually presents itself about this hour, is the painful progress of the jaded, foundered, and terrified droves of cattle that one necessarily must see not unfrequently struggling on to the appointed slaughter-house, perhaps after three days during which they have been running

“Their course of suffering in the public way.”