an attic window; now lords and ladies walking with parasols and lapdogs, and children in the private gardens of noble mansions, screened from the inquisitive pedestrians by sullen brick walls; now domestics hanging out the clothes in back-yards (seen over the roofs of one-storey houses), malicious birds of prey waiting, doubtless, round the corner for the fell purpose of pecking off their noses, while the astute King is in his counting-house on the second floor counting out his money, and the Queen, with the true gentleness of womanhood, is in the front kitchen, eating bread and honey in confident security, recking little of the four-and-twenty blackbirds baked in a pie, or of the song of sixpence—or rather of five shillings—which I am this day singing about them all, in consideration of an adequate pocketful of rye. So shall you look down and see those things; but chiefly shall you enjoy delectation and gather experience from the sight of the men and women who are continually passing beneath you in carriages and in cabs; yea, and in carts and barrows. Varied life, troubled life, busy, restless, chameleon life. The philosopher may learn much by reading the tradesmen’s names over the shop-fronts, which—he will never read them as he passes along the pavement—will give him quite a new insight into nomenclature. But only let him consider the carriages and the cabs, and he may learn wisdom in the ways of mankind in every rood of ground he traverses. Sweethearting in cabs and carriages; passionate appeals for mercy; men brawling and fighting; lunatics being borne away to captivity; felons, shackled and manacled to the chin, being taken to jail, and perhaps to death, by stern policemen and jailers; frantic women kneeling on carriage-floors, women with dishevelled hair, streaming eyes, clasped hands raised to a Heaven which is never deaf but is sometimes stern, a weeping child clinging to their disordered dress, and money and jewels cast carelessly on the carriage cushions; gamblers carding and dicing; knaves drugging fools; debtors in the charge of sheriff’s officers; roysterers gone in drink; the “fatal accident” on its way to the hospital, lying all bruised and bloody across the policeman’s knee; the octogenarian in his last paralytic fit, and the mother suckling her first infant. All these dramas on four wheels may be seen by him on the top of the omnibus, who may, if of a caustic turn, rub his hands, and cry, “Aha! little do you reck that a chiel is above you taking notes, and, faith, that he’ll print them!”