It was once our lot to meet such a character in the open area of Smithfield. Time had silvered his hair, but left a ruddy and youthful bloom upon his patriarchal countenance. He had driven his beautiful cow and calf into their allotted place, and stood with a short clean pipe in his hand, as if wondering how he should obtain a light: no doubt his morning pipe had long been to him a comfort. He glanced a moment at the cigar we were smoking, but was too diffident to ask for a light; it was not needed: an extra draw, the ash shaken off, and we offered him the fiery end, which glowed like charcoal. He "louted not low," but made a bow that would have done honour to a herald. It required but little trouble to get him to enter into conversation: He had set out long before midnight; had driven his cow and calf above twenty miles, from a beautiful village in Surrey, and was about to sell them to purchase the discharge of his son, who was a soldier at Chatham. We turned away with a sad heart, for a tear gathered in the old man's eye as he ended his simple narrative; and we thought that Smithfield still contained its martyrs. Once also we saw a young Gipsy mother and her dusky child standing silently beside her ass: she had brought it to market to sell, to release her husband from the prison, into which he was committed for poaching. But many a market in England is attended by such sufferers as these, besides Smithfield. This great market, like Bartholomew-fair, is doomed to be swept away, and Smithfield to be shorn of its glory, and the old houses left to mourn in silence. A horned and angry bullock is not the most fitting object to rush through our crowded thoroughfares, to the terror of pretty nursery-maids and little children. But, as the inimitable Matthews said, "We cannot take a hackney-coach for it;" nor can such a danger be got rid of without great injury to many of the old inhabitants, whose very bread depends upon the market. It is a [Illustration] question of "pitch and toss," whether the few are to be tossed up, or the many thrown down;--whether it is better for a few Joneses and Smiths to be thrown occasionally over the battlements of Blackfriars-bridge, or the eatinghouse-keepers and tavern-keepers about Smithfield to give up boiling, baking, and brewing. It is fat joints, marrow puddings, and everybody's entire, with no end of etceteras in the form of tollage, against the lives and limbs of her gracious Majesty's liege subjects. As the boys say, "If heads, I win; if tails, you lose." Whichever way it ends, the poetry of old Smithfield will still remain.