pocketbooks they draw greasy documents, faded envelopes, sleezy letters, which have been folded and refolded so often that they seem in imminent danger of dropping to pieces like an over-used passport at the next display. With what an owl-like, an oracular, look of wisdom they consult these papers! What are they all about? The bankruptcy of their owners thirty years ago, and the infamous behaviour of the official assignees (dead and buried years since)? their early love correspondence? their title-deeds to the estates in Ayrshire, and the large pasture lands in the Isle of Skye? Who knows? But you never see these ghostly time-waiters anywhere but on ’Change, and out of ’Change hours. Directly the legitimate business of that place of commercial re-union commences, they melt away imperceptibly, like the ghost of Hamlet’s father at cock-crow, coming like shadows and so departing. The dreadful night dens and low revelling houses of past midnight London, the only remnants left among us of the innumerable “finishes” and saloons and night-cellars of a former age, have also their peculiar male population, stamped indelibly with the mint-mark of the place, and not to be found out of it, save in the dock of the adjacent police-court. Where these _ruffiani_, these copper captains and cozening buz-gloaks, are to be found during the day, or even up to midnight—for in the gallery even of any decent theatre they would not be admitted—must remain a secret; perhaps, like the ghoules and afrits, the bats and dragons of fable, they haunt ruinous tombs, deserted sepulchres, church-yards sealed up long since by the Board of Health; but so soon as two or three o’clock in the morning arrives, they are to be found wherever there are fools to be fleeced or knaves to plot with. You study their lank hair and stained splendid stocks, their rumpled jay’s finery and rascal talk, their cheap canes and sham rings; but they, too, fade away with the dawn—how, no man can say, for the meanest cabman would scorn to convey them in his vehicle—and are not beheld any more till vagabondising time begins again.