He first goes to an iron railing attached to an uninviting blind wall, and proceeds, with a key, to extract thence a rickety wooden seat, padlocked on to the railing. This he takes to his accustomed spot, an old hoarding of ancient date, where he is allowed by sufferance of the authorities; when the hoarding is removed, the old man will lose his means of living unless he find another haunt. His wife helps him across the road, and leaves him to sit patiently all day, east wind, wet, or shine, selling studs. At five o'clock she again appears to fetch him home to tea. Once I witnessed a little domestic drama between the two. It arose thus. The old man had been talking one day to another woman,--a decrepit old waif she was,--and, when the wife returned, the poor old husband had to expiate his flirtation sorely. His wife "let him have it" all the way over the return crossing, undeterred by passing 'buses, or cabmens' jeers, from "speaking her mind"; and she was still hard at it, to judge from her thin shoulders and her gesticulations, as they passed out of sight together into the foggy night. [Illustration: _The Pavement Artist._] "Pavement artists," too, select the near neighbourhood of the squares as their favoured haunt. These "open-air pastellists," as they have been called, are a curious, unshaven, dilapidated race, with an indescribable "come-down-in-the world" look about them; and their lot seems hardly an enviable one. Their "plant," it is true, is not large; a few coloured chalks and a soft duster form all their necessary stock-in-trade. Gifted often with a fair amount of technical ability, they lead the passerby to wonder, whether, given happier circumstances and a less vivid acquaintance with the bar of the public house, they might not now be exhibiting their efforts on the sacred walls of the Royal Academy. Not that the Royal Academy pictures themselves would, for that matter, if they could be painted on the pavement, draw so many coppers as the lurid representations of railway accidents, or the scenes of domestic bliss, or the "Mother's Grave" (the public love sentiment and pathos), or even the innocent mackerel or salmon, "as like as like," that form the _répertoire_ of the pavement artist. His wares, to catch pennies, have to be highly coloured, if nothing else. His trials are many; dust and rain efface his pictures, drunken navvies fall foul of him, cramp attacks his legs, and east wind benumbs his fingers, till, poor wretch, no wonder that he repairs, with his hardly won money, to the nearest public-house,--the poor man's refuge. He is, on the other hand, not obliged to rise early or to work after dark, and it is said that occasionally his takings average as much as 4/6 per day, although an amateur who recently tried his hand at the business only gained 3-1/2_d_, a violent headache, and nearly a sunstroke. There is, it is true, a new and degenerate kind of Pavement Artist, who, instead of painstakingly bedaubing the same