It would have suited my interests very well, when the day came round, to have forfeited my half-guinea, and have attended exclusively to my own business; but judging it more to my credit to go through with the work I had undertaken, I was at my post, together with several of my colleagues, before the hour had struck.  Some of our members did not come at all the first day, but sent their half-guineas; others, having to come in from the suburbs before omnibus-time, arrived too late, and were fined in smaller sums for the breach of punctuality.  Our party being at length complete, to the number of ten, we indue our cloaks, and, pioneered by the ward-beadle with his ponderous mace, we sally forth to feel the charitable pulse of several parishes.  Ten good men and true, swathed to the chin in voluminous folds of broad-cloth fringed with fur, and headed by the ample proportions of the mace-bearer in scarlet and cloth of gold; our apparition, and our mission too, were plainly a mystery to the major part of the population, who, seeing us but once a year, and then but momentarily, as the procession emerges suddenly from one door to plunge into another, do not very well know what to make of it.  ’Is that there a buryin’ or a marryin’?’ ‘What’s that lot o’ fellows after?’ ’What’s up now, Jem?’—­such are a few of the inquiries which from time to time testified the astonishment of the uninitiated; to all of which our imperturbable leader opposed a face as impenetrable as that of the sphinx of the desert.  We should have been sadly at a loss, by the way, without him.  He knew every soul in the whole ward who would come down to the extent of a sixpence for the sake of the poor; and he led his small phalanx boldly to the charge through all impediments.  Under his guidance, we did what certainly we should never have attempted without it.  We stormed the stout citadels of the merchants, and carried their strongholds up as high as the third and fourth floors, and captured many a poor man’s dinner from the very jaws of the cash-box.  We dived into cellars, and crouched and crept into subterranean dens.  We threaded muddy lanes, and wandered among bewildering wharfs, and mounted lofts and sheds, and squeezed ourselves into all sorts of out-of-the-way slums.  We climbed ladders leading up into creaking timber galleries, and got into regions of old planks and cobwebs, dim with dust and odorous with ancient smells.  We assailed the scholar at his studies, and the craftsman at his labour, and from all and each we met with a courteous reception, and gathered the sinews of benevolence.  The dispositions of men vary in few things more than in their several modes of conferring a favour.  Some of our most liberal donors thoughtfully sent their bank-notes to the vestry, to save us the trouble of waiting upon them; others, on the contrary, levied the full value of their gifts, by keeping us wearily waiting before we got them.  A barber, whom we found at his block busily weaving