THE most popular lounging thoroughfares of the west-end, such as Regent Street, the Burlington Arcade, Bond Street, or Piccadilly, are not those in which the Gents are to be often encountered in the day-time. The majority of them have evidently occupations, which keep them somewhere until four or five o’clock, so that they never come out in their full force until dusk, except on holidays; and then the short steamboats are the best places to find them. In fine weather, they discard the staring shawl for a blue handkerchief, with white spots; and then they provide themselves with a cigar (the cigar again!), a bottle of stout, and a Sunday paper, and, from the edge of the paddle-box, or from the top of the cabin, defy the world. You can find out their locality by the vapour of the cigar, as the “smoke which so gracefully curled” showed the author of “The Woodpecker” that he was in the vicinity of a cottage. If you cannot discover them by this sign, you must look out for their studs—they have a great idea of studs—usually like blue raspberries, which you will find glittering in the sun. If, by chance, they wear a long stock, then they have two pins and a chain; but such pins! and such a chain! You can never see any thing like them, unless you go to the Lowther Arcade; and there, amongst those wondrous collections of ornamental and useful articles which strew that thoroughfare—for all the houses appear to have turned themselves and their contents out of the window—you will find similar ones; meant, however, if we mistake not, for the back plaits of ladies’ hair. And this reminds us that the Lowther Arcade is a favourite lounge with the Gents: it is possible that, from the glittering stores here displayed, they acquire their taste for jewellery. The Lowther Arcade is to the men in the city chambers what the Burlington is to the denizens of the Albany. It is, as it were, the frontier between the two hemispheres of London life, to which position it lays some claim, inasmuch as when very crowded, a personal examination of effects sometimes takes place on passing it. And great is the throng here of an afternoon, principally composed of Gents and seedy foreigners, walking up an appetite for the incomprehensible carte of Berthollini; or a doubtful cross between these two varieties of the human species, found, upon investigation, to be attached to billiard-tables. And, by the way, remember, that of all the scamps upon town, your billiard-table _habitués_ are the darkest. Here they walk up and down for hours, loading the air with the products of combustion from their cheap cigars, (cigars again!) puffing the smoke into every bonnet they meet, or standing at the entrance with a whip in their hands, as though they had just got off their horse, and were keeping an appointment. But in reality they have no horse, nor do they expect any body. [Illustration] [Illustration]