and they were bare, plump, and mottled) that excited his carnivorous propensities, for, long as is the lapse of time, I remember that he rushed at me like a coffee-coloured tiger. His mistress was a Duchess, the grandest, handsomest Duchess that had ever lived (of course, I except Georgina of Devonshire) since the days of that Grace of Queensberry of whom Mr. Thackeray was good enough to tell us in the “Virginians.” She, my Duchess, wore a hat and feathers, diamonds, and a _moustache_—a downy nimbus round her mouth, like that which Mr. Philip insinuates rather than paints in his delightful Spanish girls’ faces. I see her now, parading the cliff at Brighton, with her black velvet train—yes, madam, her train—held up by a page. She was the last duchess who drove down to Brighton in a coach and six. She was the last duchess who at Twelfth-night parties had a diamond ring baked in the cake which was to be distributed by lots. Before she came to her coronet, she had been a singing woman at a playhouse, had married a very foolish rich old banker, and, at his death, remarried a more foolish and very poor duke. But she was an excellent woman, and the relative to whom she left the bulk of her wealth, is one of the most charitable, as I am also afraid she is one of the most _ennuyée_, ladies in England. I am proud of my reminiscence. It is not every one that has seen a Dutch pug and the Duchess of St. Albans alive. Body of me! here am I wasting my time among the dog-fanciers—(when the name of the man in the iron mask, the authorship of “Junius,” the murderer of Caspar Hauser, and the date of the laws of Menu, shall be known, it shall also be patent to all men why trafficking in dogs and horses seem necessarily connected with roguery)—here am I descanting on poodles and pug-dogs, when, with quick observant eyes, I should be noting the hundred little trades that are being driven at three o’clock in the afternoon. The feverish industry—the untiring perseverance—the bitter struggle, and all for yon scanty morsel of bread, and a few inches of space for repose at night in a fourpenny lodging-house! Follow the kerb-stone from the County Fire Office to St. Martin’s Lane. See the itinerant venders of catch-’em-alive-o’s, of cheap toys, of quires of writing-paper, sealing-wax and envelopes, all for the small charge of one penny; see the industrials who have walking-sticks, umbrellas, gutta-percha whips, aërated balls, locomotive engines and statuettes of Napoleon in glass phials, that make us wonder, as with flies in amber, however they, the engines and statuettes, got there; the women who have bouquets to dispose of—how many times have they been refreshed beneath the pump, this droughty day?—the boys and girls in looped and windowed raggedness striving to sell fruit, flowers, almanacks, pencils, fusees—anything, to keep the wolf from the door. He is always at the door, that wolf—always at that yawning portal, and his name is Famine.