He was proprietor of sixty-four stage-coaches, worked by 1,500 horses, and giving yearly returns of more than half a million sterling. Sir William Cubitt, when a lad, worked at his father’s flour-mills. Michael Faraday was the son of a poor blacksmith; and J. W. Turner, of a hairdresser in Maiden Lane. Mr. W. Johnson Fox, at one time M.P. for Oldham—the great orator of the Anti-Corn-Law League, and the “Publicola” of the _Weekly Dispatch_, when that paper could afford ten guineas a-week for a good article—was a Norwich factory lad. I knew a lad, born in the village in which I was born, in the humblest rank of life. I found him one day one of the churchwardens of a city parish, and a man of substance. I expressed my surprise, as even he could not read. “Ah, sir,” was his reply, “I came to London determined to be a man or a mouse; and here I am.” It is so all over London. The great warehouses in Cheapside and Cannon Street, and Victoria Street and elsewhere, are mostly owned by men who began life without a rap. Go to the “beautiful” villas around London, and ask who live there, and you will find that they are inhabited by men whose wealth is enormous; whose fathers were beggars; and whose career has been a marvellous success. In one of his songs, Barry Cornwall tells us, that when he was a little boy, he was told that the streets of London were paved with gold; and it must be admitted that, to the youthful mind in general, the metropolis is a sort of Tom Tiddler’s ground, where gold and silver are to be picked up in handfuls any day. There is a good deal, it is hardly necessary to say, of exaggeration in this. To many, London is dark and dismal as one of its fogs, and cold and stony as one of its own streets. It is difficult to estimate the number of persons, in the lowest stage of pauperism, who rise every morning not knowing where to earn their daily broad. Wonderful are the shifts and ingenuities of this unfortunate class. One summer day a lady friend of the writer was driving in one of the pleasant green lanes of Hornsey, when she saw a poor woman gathering the leaves of a horse-chestnut. She asked her why she did so. The reply was, that she got a living by selling them to the fruiterers in Covent Garden, who lined their baskets of fruit with them. One day it came out in evidence at a police-court, that a mother and her children earned a scanty subsistence by rising early in the morning, or rather late at night, and selling, as waste paper, the broad sheets and placards with which the waste walls of the metropolis were adorned. It seems to me, one of the worst sights of the outskirts of London, is that of women, all black and grimy, sifting the cinders and rubbish collected by the wandering dustmen. Perhaps that is as dirty a way for a woman to make money as possible; and yet it seemed to me that their hands were clean, compared with those of certain stock and money-brokers, and promoters of