The Yorkshireman having adjusted himself in the old flat-flapped hack saddle, and got his stirrups let out from "Binjimin's" length to his own, gathered up the stiff, weather-beaten reins, gave the animal a touch with his spurs, and fell into the rear of Mr. Jorrocks. The morning appeared to be getting worse. Instead of the grey day-dawn of the country, when the thin transparent mist gradually rises from the hills, revealing an unclouded landscape, a dense, thick, yellow fog came rolling in masses along the streets, obscuring the gas lights, and rendering every step one of peril. It could be both eat and felt, and the damp struck through their clothes in the most summary manner. "This is bad," said Mr. Jorrocks, coughing as he turned the corner by Drury Lane, making for Catherine Street, and upset an early breakfast and periwinkle stall, by catching one corner of the fragile fabric with his toe, having ridden too near to the pavement. "Where are you for now? and bad luck to ye, ye boiled lobster!" roared a stout Irish wench, emerging from a neighbouring gin-palace on seeing the dainty viands rolling in the street. "Cut away!" cried Jorrocks to his friend, running his horse between one of George Stapleton's dust-carts and a hackney-coach, "or the Philistines will be upon us." The fog and crowd concealed them, but "Holloa! mind where you're going, you great haw-buck!" from a buy-a-hearth-stone boy, whose stock-in-trade Jorrocks nearly demolished, as he crossed the corner of Catherine Street before him, again roused his vigilance. "The deuce be in the fog," said he, "I declare I can't see across the Strand. It's as dark as a wolf's mouth.--Now where are you going to with that meazly-looking cab of yours?--you've nearly run your shafts into my 'oss's ribs!" cried he to a cabman who nearly upset him. The Strand was kept alive by a few slip-shod housemaids, on their marrow-bones, washing the doorsteps, or ogling the neighbouring pot-boy on his morning errand for the pewters. Now and then a crazy jarvey passed slowly by, while a hurrying mail, with a drowsy driver and sleeping guard, rattled by to deliver their cargo at the post office. Here and there appeared one of those beings, who like the owl hide themselves by day, and are visible only in the dusk. Many of them appeared to belong to the other world. Poor, puny, ragged, sickly-looking creatures, that seemed as though they had been suckled and reared with gin. "How different," thought the Yorkshireman to himself, "to the fine, stout, active labourer one meets at an early hour on a hunting morning in the country!" His reverie was interrupted on arriving opposite the _Morning Chronicle_ office, by the most discordant yells that ever issued from human beings, and on examining the quarter from whence they proceeded, a group of fifty or a hundred boys, or rather little old men, were seen with newspapers in their hands and under their arms, in all the activity of speculation and exchange. "A