“Course I know. It fetched its price, cert’inly, when you could get away to sell it; but what I’m speaking of is the inconwenience of it. We didn’t want no grub, don’t you see; it was the sp’iling of us. S’pose now we was served like what I just told you; got reg’lar loaded-up when we was a couple of miles away. What was we to do? We couldn’t go on a swearin’ as how we was starvin’ with wittles bustin’ out of us all round. We was ’bliged to shoot the load afore we could begin ag’in. Sometimes we had to do the ‘long trot’” (go home) “with it, and so sp’iled a whole arternoon. If we got a chance, we shot it down a gully, or in a dunghole in a mews. Anythink to get rid of it, don’t you see. I should like to have just now the rattlin’ lot of grub we’ve been ’bliged to get rid of in that there way.” Despite the decline of the trade of “shallowing,” however, as the reader must have observed, it is one that is regarded as worth resorting to in “season.” A more favourite “dodge” at the present is to appear before the public not in rags and tatters and with patches of naked flesh disgustingly visible, but in sound thorough labour-stained attire, and affect the style either of the ashamed unaccustomed beggar or that of the honest working mechanic, who, desperately driven by stress of poverty, shapes his loud-mouthed appeal in tones of indignant remonstrance that rich and prosperous England should permit a man such as he is to be reduced to the uncomfortable plight in which you now behold him. He is a solitary cadger, and gets himself up in a manner so artful, that it is only when you pay attention to his “speech,” and find that he repeats precisely the same words over and over again, that you begin to have a suspicion that he is not exactly what he seems. Like the “shallow cove,” he prefers a very cold or a very wet and miserable day. He does not enter a street walking in the middle of the road, as the common “chanting” or “pattering” beggar does; he walks on the pavement with slow and hesitating gait, and at frequent intervals casts hasty and nervous glances behind him, as though fearful that he is watched or followed. Possibly he is so afraid. At all events, should a policeman by rare chance steal round the corner, his steps will increase in length, and he will pass out of the street just as an ordinary pedestrian might; but should he be free to play his “little game,” he will set about it as follows.