A thing you very often see in London, and, indeed, in other towns, too, is a man sitting on the bare stone pavement drawing pictures on the stones with coloured chalks. Sometimes he does them very well, and makes scenes of battles and views of pretty places or ships at sea, but at other times they are hideous and badly drawn. He does this in order that people may give him pennies as they pass. He is not allowed to beg, and if he tried to the policeman would come and take him up; but he doesn't like hard work, so he sits beside his pictures and holds his cap out piteously, and very often people give him pennies in passing, so he makes a living without too much trouble. But unless he is old or crippled, he ought to be doing better work than this. There are always a great many odd men who have no work to do in London; there are some who earn a living by going about in the early morning, when people put their dustbins out, and picking out anything that they think they can sell--a disgusting trade; others used to watch until they saw a cab with luggage on it, and then they ran after it sometimes for miles and miles, and when it stopped they would offer to carry the boxes upstairs. These men certainly earned their money, for they had to run fast and far, and to carry a box up the flights and flights of stairs in a London house is not an easy task; but, unfortunately, they were generally men who were out of work through their own fault, who had been drunken or idle or rude, and they were not at all pleasant to deal with, and sometimes they made themselves very disagreeable if they didn't get what they considered enough money, and refused to go out of the house until a policeman was fetched. So it is as well perhaps that now this means of extorting money is impossible, for no man could run fast enough to keep up with a taxi-cab.