Cheap things is nasty. At least that's wrong, for cheap things is good, and the real cheap things is the best of everything; and what you've got to do is this--have a little, but have it good. I've watched the dodges long enough to know; I've stuck up the cheap advertising bills, and then looked into it, and blowed the missus up for being so took in: cheap soap as is kept wet and runs all to a mosh in the water; cheap rice full of grit; cheap bacon as shrinks in the pot; cheap currants with plenty of stones; cheap meat--there, if there is a cruel thing perpetrated on the poor people of London streets, it's that sending up diseased beasts, sheep, and pigs, to be sold cheap; and if I were the Lord Mayor of London, or either of the other magistrates (which ain't likely to be the case this year, because the election's over, and there ain't a bench at liberty) I'd just tar the gentlemen as sells the stuff with their own brush, I'd--I would, and no mistake--I'd feed 'em with their own meat-- now then! I've stuck so much poetry about cheap clothes for the tailors, and strong tea for the groshers, that I'm sick of it; but I know one piece right off by heart, and at the end of a verse it says:-- "Oh, God, that bread should be so dear, And flesh and blood so cheap!" You know! "Song of the shirt." Cheap shirts for cheap people, who make fortunes out of the poor. "Oh," you'll say, "that was only a made-up thing." What! here, save up your pence and go down Bethnal Green, or amongst the tottering old houses in Spitalfields, places where I can find heaps of spots for sticking bills, and you can hunt 'em out for yourself; women sewing their shrouds, hard at work at 'em, doing a little bit every day till they get 'em done, and then the parish sends a cheap coffin, supplied by the lowest bidder, the undertaker as does these things by contract on the cheap fetches the rough black case; and then "rattle his bones over the stones," and off to the cemetery; and you and I will buy the cheap shirt, and find as the calico's thin, and the buttons come off, and the stitches fall out almost from our bargain.