everything to advantage. Ordinary articles of food attract us by the new light in which they are placed; even uncooked fish lie so delightfully dressed that the rainbow gleam of their scales attracts us; raw meat lies, as if painted, on neat and many-colored porcelain plates, garlanded about with parsley--yes, everything seems painted, reminding us of the highly polished yet modest pictures of Franz Mieris. But the human beings whom we see are not so cheerful as in the Dutch paintings, for they sell the jolliest wares with the most serious faces, and the cut and color of their clothes is as uniform as that of their houses. On the opposite side of the town, which they call the West End--"_the west end of the town_"--and where the more aristocratic and less occupied world lives, the uniformity spoken of is still more dominant; yet here there are very long and very broad streets, where all the houses are large as palaces, though anything but remarkable as regards their exterior, unless we except the fact that in these, as in all the better class of houses in London, the windows of the first _étage_ (or second story) are adorned with iron-barred balconies, and also on the _rez de chaussée_ there is a black railing protecting the entrance to certain subterranean apartments. In this part of the city there are also great "squares," where rows of houses like those already described form a quadrangle, in whose centre there is a garden, inclosed by an iron railing and containing some statue or other. In all of these places and streets the eye is never shocked by the dilapidated huts of misery. Everywhere we are stared down on by wealth and respectability, while, crammed away in retired lanes and dark, damp alleys, Poverty dwells with her rags and her tears.