Seven o’clock in the morning! I have already ventured a passing allusion to the “milk.” The poor little children who sell violets and water-cresses debouch from the great thoroughfares, and ply their humble trade in by-streets full of private houses. The newsvenders’ shops in the Strand, Holywell Street, and Fleet Street, are all in full activity. Legions of assistants crowd behind the broad counters, folding the still damp sheets of the morning newspapers, and, with fingers moving in swift legerdemain, tell off “quires” and “dozens” of cheap periodicals. If it happen to be seven o’clock, and a Friday morning, not only the doors of the great newsvenders—such as Messrs. Smith and Son and Mr. Vickers—but the portals of all the newspaper offices, will be crowded with newsmen’s carts and newsmen’s trucks; and from the gaping gates themselves will issue hordes of newsmen and flying cohorts of newsboys—boys with parcels, boys with bags, boys with satchels, men staggering under the weight of great piles of printed paper. Mercy on us! what a plethora of brainwork is about, and what a poor criterion of its quality the quantity manifestly affords! Yon tiny urchin with the red comforter has but half-a-dozen copies tucked beneath his arm of a journal sparkling with wit, and radiant in learning, and scathing in its satire, and Titanic in its vigour; yet, treading on his heels, comes a colossus in corduroy, eclipsed by a quadrangular mountain of closely-packed paper, quires—nay, whole reams—of some ragamuffin print, full of details of the last murder and abuse of some wise and good statesman because he happens to be a lord.