course of the market, and to suit his wares to the prevailing caprice. And, like the cotton-spinner, he sometimes goes into the “Gazette,” paying but an infinitesimal dividend in the pound. Did I not struggle midway into a phrase, some page or so since, and did it not waltz away from me on the nimble feet of a parenthesis? I fear that such was the case. How can I hope, I reiterate, to give you anything like a complete picture of the doings in London while still the clock goes round? I might take one house and unroof it, one street and unpave it, one man and disclose to you the secrets of twenty-four hours of his daily and nightly life; but it is London, in its entirety, that I have presumed to “time”—forgetting, oh! egregious and inconsistent!—that every minute over which the clock hand passes is as the shake of the wrist applied to a kaleidoscope, and that the whole aspect of the city changes with as magical rapidity. I should be Briareus multiplied by ten thousand, and not Asmodeus at all, if I could set down in writing a tithe of London’s sayings and doings, acts and deeds, seemings and aspects, at seven o’clock in the morning. Only consider. Drumming with your finger on a map of the metropolis; just measure a few palms’ lengths, say from Camberwell Gate to the “Mother Redcap,” on the one hand—from Limehouse Church to Kensington Gravel Pits, on the other. Take the cubic dimensions, my dear sir; think of the mean area; rub up those mathematics, for proficiency in whose more recondite branches you so narrowly escaped being second wrangler, twenty years since; out with your logarithms, your conic sections, your fluxions, and calculate the thousands upon thousands of little dramas that must be taking place in London as the clock strikes seven. Let me glance at a few, as I travel with you towards that railway terminus which is our destination. Camberwell Gate: tollbar-keeper, who has been up all night, going to bed, very cross; tollbar-keeper’s wife gets up to mind the gate, also very cross. Woodendesk Grove, Grosvenor Park, Camberwell: Mr. Dockett, wharfage clerk in Messrs. Charter Party and Co.’s shipping house, Lower Thames Street, is shaving. He breakfasts at half-past seven, and has to be in the city by nine. Precisely at the same time that he is passing Mr. Mappin’s razor over his commercial countenance, Mr. Flybynight, aged twenty-two, also a clerk, but attached to the Lost-Monkey-and-Mislaid-Poodle-Department (Inland Revenue), Somerset House, lets himself into No. 7, Woodendesk Grove, next door to Mr. Dockett’s, by means of a Chubb’s key. Mr. Flybynight is in evening costume, considerably the worst for the concussion of pale ale bottle corks. On his elegant tie are the stains of the dressing of some lobster salad, and about half-a-pint of the crimson stream of life, formerly the joint property of Mr. Flybynight’s nose and of a cabman’s upper lip, both injured during a “knock-down and drag-out” fight, supervening