“Supers,” too—or theatrical supernumeraries, to give them their full title—are a decidedly distinctive and peculiar race; and though reported, and ordinarily believed, to exercise certain trades and handicrafts in the daytime, such as shoemaking, tailoring, bookbinding, and the like, my private belief is that no “super” could exist long in any atmosphere remote from behind the scenes or the vicinity of the stage-door of a theatre. Look, too, at the audience of a police court: look at the pinched men who persist in attending the sittings of the Insolvent Debtors’ Court in Portugal Street, or hang about the dingy tavern opposite, and who consume with furtive bites Abernethy biscuits and saveloys, half hidden in the folds of blue cotton pocket-handkerchiefs. Yes, the proverb reads aright—as many men, so many minds; and each man’s mind, his idiosyncrasy, leads him to frequent a certain place till he becomes habituated to it, and cannot separate himself therefrom. There are your men who delight in witnessing surgical operations, and those who never miss going to a hanging. There is a class of people who have a morbid predilection for attending coroners’ inquests, and another who insist upon going to the Derby, be the weather wet or dry, cold or hot, though they scarcely know a horse’s fore from his hind legs, and have never a sixpenny bet on the field. There is a class who hang about artists’ studios, knowing no more of painting than Mr. Wakley does of poetry; there are the men you meet at charity dinners, the women you meet at marriages and christenings. Again, there is a class of eccentrics, who, like the crazy Earl of Portsmouth, have an invincible _penchant_ for funerals—“black jobs,” as the mad lord used to call them; and finally, there are the people who haunt SALES BY AUCTION. [Illustration: THREE O’CLOCK P.M.: DEBENHAM AND STORR’S AUCTION-ROOMS.]