The bustling eve, when midnight surprises the scrambling teems of “Trotty Vecks,” gathering up the fragments left from rich folk’s caterings, that they too may have a savour of something more than the compliments of the season; when the remnants of the bountiful display that has been hoarded up for the highest bidders through the busy day, are auctioned off at the buyer’s own price, and fall thus perchance within the compass of the weaver’s earnings, then is the hour to see the spirit of peace and good-will towards men stalking abroad, and lifting from men’s hearts and faces the load of weariness and veil of care, transmuting by his magic touch the poor man’s copper into gold, and giving to his little stores a widow’s cruise-like power to cheer and comfort happy living hearts. No one who dwells in the old city should deem it fruitless toil to wend their way through the old market-place on Christmas Eve, and take a poet’s lesson from the scene! But there are other pictures still to be seen within the quaint old Elizabethan frame-work of the city’s market-place than scenes of merchandise, in these days of monster meetings. Who can forget the human gatherings that have many a time and oft, within the limits of even childhood’s memory, been witnessed here, when gable roofs, and parapets, windows, and balconies, church towers, and Guildhall leads, have swarmed with living thousands; gay dressed “totties” and dames, aye, and sober-minded lords of the creation too! all eager and intent to watch from safe quarters some common object of attraction that has drawn together a mighty multitude of the people, with their proverbial love of sight-seeing, an inheritance bequeathed to them by their ancestral pageantries. Slight stimulus is needed to send the heart’s blood of the city through every vein and artery to this centre, where it pulsates in deep and heavy throbs of joy, or hope, or anger, as the case may be; true, in these modern days the common wants and common blessings that have bound the sympathies of the million into one, cause the spectacle of tumultuous hate and bitterness, knocking together of heads, &c, to be a rare manifestation of popular enthusiasm; more frequently one desire, one feeling animates the body aggregate, be it to see the mammoth train of a Hughes or Van Amburgh, the _entrée_ of a royal duke, the failure of a promised fountain bid to play by a new water company, the more successful display of fireworks at the same behest, the popping of some threescore pensioners in honour of some royal birthday, or the advent of some political election. On each and all of such occasions, and many more, the filling up of the frame-work is a picture of life, of concentrated human power, will, and passion, full of effect; may be, it needs an adequate cause to give it full strength, but everywhere it is full of interest, and the good old city’s market-place would not be fairly