A little farther on, was a noisy excited crowd round two men carrying a shutter, on which was strapped the bleeding body (a handkerchief spread over the face) of a poor bricklayer, who had fallen a few minutes before from the top of some scaffolding in the neighborhood, and was at that instant in the agonies of death--leaving behind him a wife and nine children, for whom the poor fellow had long slaved from morning to night, and who were now ignorant of the frightful fate which had befallen him, and that they were left utterly destitute. _There_, was a skinny little terrified urchin, about eight years old, with nothing to conceal his dirty, half-starved body, but a tattered man's coat, pinned round him; dying with hunger, he had stolen a villanous-looking bare bone--scarce a halfpenny worth of meat upon it; and a brawny constable, his knuckles fiercely dug into the poor little offender's neck, (with his tight grasp,) was leading him off, followed by his shrieking mother, to the police-office, whence he would be committed to Newgate; and thence, after two or three months' imprisonment, and being flogged--miserable little wretch!--by the common hangman, (who had hanged the child's father some six months before,) he would be discharged--to return probably several times and undergo a similar process; then to be transported; and finally be hanged, as had been his father before him. These startling scenes passed before Mr. Aubrey, in the course of a five minutes' walk down Saffron Hill--during which period he now and then paused, and gazed around him with feelings of pity, of astonishment, of disgust, which presently blended and deepened into a dark sense of horror. These scenes, to some so fatally familiar--_fatally_, I mean, on account of the INDIFFERENCE which familiarity is apt to induce--to Mr. Aubrey, had on them all the frightful glare of _novelty_. He had never witnessed anything of the sort before; and had no notion of its existence. The people residing on each side of the Hill, however, seemed accustomed to such scenes; which they appeared to view with the same dreadful indifference with which a _lamb led to the slaughter_ is beheld by one who has spent his life next door to the slaughter-house. The Jew clothesman, before whose shop-window, arrested by the horrifying spectacle of the bleeding wretch borne along to the hospital--Mr. Aubrey had remained standing for a second or two--took the opportunity to assail him, with insolent and pertinacious importunities to purchase some articles of clothing! A fat baker, and a greasy eating-house keeper, stood each at his door, one with folded arms, the other with his hands thrust into his pockets--both of them gazing with a grin at two curs fighting in the middle of the street--oh, how utterly insensible to the ravenous want around them! The pallid spectres haunting the gin-shop--a large splendid building at the corner--gazed with sunken