parasol is gay; papa’s neck-cloth is white, and terribly starched.  Dick Swiveller leans against a wall, his hands in his pockets, a primrose held between his teeth, contemplating the opera of Punch and Judy, which is being conducted under the management of Messrs. Codlings and Short.  You turn a corner and you meet the coffin of little Paul Dombey borne along.  Who would have thought of encountering a funeral in this place?  In the afternoon you hear the rich tones of the organ from Miss La Creevy’s first floor, for Tom Pinch has gone to live there now, and as you know all the people as you know your own brothers and sisters, and consequently require no letters of introduction, you go up and talk with the dear old fellow about all his friends and your friends, and towards evening he takes your arm, and you walk out to see poor Nelly’s grave—­a place which he visits often, and which he dresses with flowers with his own hands.  I know this is the idlest dreaming, but all of us have a sympathy with the creatures of the drama and the novel.  Around the hardest cark and toil lies the imaginative world of the poets and romancists, and thither we sometimes escape to snatch a mouthful of serener air.  There our best lost feelings have taken a human shape.  We suppose that boyhood with its impulses and enthusiasms has subsided with the gray cynical man whom we have known these many years.  Not a bit of it.  It has escaped into the world of the poet, and walks a love-flushed Romeo in immortal youth.  We suppose that the Mary of fifty years since, the rose-bud of a girl that crazed our hearts, blossomed into the spouse of Jenkins, the stockbroker, and is now a grandmother.  Not at all.  She is Juliet leaning from the balcony, or Portia talking on the moonlight lawns at Belmont.  There walk the shadows of our former selves.  All that Time steals he takes thither; and to live in that world is to live in our lost youth, our lost generosities, illusions, and romances.

In middle-class life, and in the professions, when a standard or ideal is tacitly set up, to which every member is expected to conform on pain of having himself talked about, and wise heads shaken over him, the quick feelings of the vagabond are not frequently found.  Yet, thanks to Nature, who sends her leafage and flowerage up through all kinds of debris, and who takes a blossomy possession of ruined walls and desert places, it is never altogether dead!  And of vagabonds, not the least delightful is he who retains poetry and boyish spirits beneath the crust of a profession.  Mr. Carlyle commends “central fire,” and very properly commends it most when “well covered in.”  In the case of a professional man, this “central fire” does not manifest itself in wasteful explosiveness, but in secret genial heat, visible in fruits of charity and pleasant humour.  The physician who is a humourist commends himself doubly to a sick-bed.  His patients are as much indebted for their cure to his smile, his voice, and