The "Bum Boat" man is one of the most picturesque sights of that most picturesque of cities, London. The few who still ply their avocation on the river, are in pretty comfortable circumstances, and their lives are as happy as can be imagined, much more so, I have no doubt, than they were when there were hundreds of them paddling about the river and impoverishing themselves by a ruinous competition. [Sidenote: HOW DICK GETS HIS PORRIDGE.] I have often noticed miserable, wan, and half naked looking little children, in and around the Regent's Circus, and in the neighborhood of the Cafés and Pall Mall, with small bags made from the material used in potato sacks, collecting cigar ends and crusts of bread from ash heaps and dust bins. Wondering what use could be made of these disgusting fragments, I one day accosted a lad of twelve years or thereabouts, who was busily engaged in searching a dust bin near Simpson's Tavern in the Strand, which is a resort for fashionable diners out. I said to him, after giving him a penny, which will always unclose the lips of the sauciest London street boy: "Child, why do you collect these fragments of crusts and cigar ends?" "Mister," said the half frightened child, who took me at the first glance for a detective in plain clothes--and by the way, it seems as if every poorly clad and hungry man and woman in London were suspicious of the police, for the reason that they are poorly clad, and for that reason alone-- [Illustration: "I GETS IT FOR CIGAR STUMPS."] "Mister," said the hungry child, whose face was prematurely aged, "I aint doing nothink; I was only grabbing the crusts for porridge." "For porridge,--how do you make the porridge, my lad?" "My mother--she is down in Milbank street, and has got the small pox, but before she was sick she used to bile the crusts in hot water and put a pennorth o' oat meal in the pot. She borrowed the pot from Mrs. Clarke, she did." "Who makes the porridge now, boy," said I to him. "A gal--me big sister Mag--she makes ladies' shoes for a shop, and wacks me when she's mad and I aint got no money for gin. I likes porridge, and Mag she makes it so preshis 'ot. My name's Dick." "Well, Dick, how do you get the 'pennorth' of oat meal for the porridge?" "I gets it for cigar stumps. I finds a lot on 'em and sells 'em, and I gets ten browns for a pound on 'em. The tibbaccy man buys 'em, but he wont buy the short ones, cause he says they are all wet and the tibbaccy is all gone from them. I makes tuppence a day sometimes." There are, I am told, fifty or sixty persons, men and boys, some of whom are Irish, engaged in this branch of the Street Finders' vocation.