There is a pleasure in overcoming obstacles; mere action is something; imagination is more; and the spinning of the blood, and vivacity of the mental endeavour, act well upon one another, and gradually put you in a state of robust consciousness and triumph. Every time you set down your leg you have a respect for it. The umbrella is held in the hand like a roaring trophy. We are now reaching the country: the fog and rain are over; and we meet our old friends the watchmen, staid, heavy, indifferent, more coat than man, pondering, yet not pondering, old but not reverend, immensely useless. No; useless they are not; for the inmates of the houses think them otherwise, and in that imagination they do good. We do not pity the watchmen as we used. Old age often cares little for regular sleep. They could not be sleeping perhaps if they were in their beds; and certainly they would not be earning. What sleep they get is perhaps sweeter in the watch-box,--a forbidden sweet; and they have a sense of importance, and a claim on the persons in-doors, which, together with the amplitude of their coating, and the possession of the box itself, make them feel themselves, not without reason, to be "somebody." They are peculiar and official. Tomkins is a cobbler as well as they; but then he is no watchman. He cannot speak to "things of night;" nor bid "any man stand in the king's name." He does not get fees and gratitude from the old, the infirm, and the drunken; nor "let gentlemen go;" nor is he "a parish-man." The churchwardens don't speak to him. If he put himself ever so much in the way of "the great plumber," he would not say, "How do you find yourself, Tomkins?"--"An ancient and quiet watchman." Such he was in the time of Shakespeare, and such he is now. Ancient, because he cannot help it; and quiet, because he will not help it, if possible; his object being to procure quiet on all sides, his own included. For this reason he does not make too much noise in crying the hour, nor is offensively particular in his articulation. No man shall sleep the worse for him, out of a horrid sense of the word "three." The sound shall be three, four, or one, as suits their mutual convenience. Yet characters are to be found even among watchmen. They are not all mere coat, and lump, and indifference. By-the-way, what do they think of in general? How do they vary the monotony of their ruminations from one to two, and from two to three, and so on? Are they comparing themselves with the unofficial cobbler; thinking of what they shall have for dinner to-morrow; or what they were about six years ago; or that their lot is the hardest in the world, as insipid old people are apt to think, for the pleasure of grumbling; or that it has some advantages nevertheless, besides fees; and that if they are not in bed, their wife is?