Chamberss Edinburgh Journal, No. 437 | Page 4

to resume the broom; commercial
gentlemen are not particular about the condition of their Wellingtons,
when nobody can see to criticise their polish, and all they want is to
exchange them for slippers as soon as possible. If we were to follow the
career of this industrious fellow up to manhood, we should in all
probability find him occupying worthily a hard-working but decent and
comfortable position in society.
No. 3 is the Occasional Sweeper.--Now and then, in walking the
interminable streets, one comes suddenly upon very questionable
shapes, which, however, we don't question, but walk on and account for
them mythically if we can. Among these singular apparitions which at
times have startled us, not a few have borne a broom in their hands, and
appealed to us for a reward for services which, to say the best of them,
were extremely doubtful. Now an elderly gentleman in silver spectacles,
with pumps on his feet, and a roquelaure with a fur-collar over his
shoulders, and an expression of unutterable anguish in his countenance,
holds out his hand and bows his head as we pass, and groans audibly
the very instant we are within earshot of a groan; which is a distance of
about ten inches in a London atmosphere. Now an old, old man, tall,
meagre, and decrepit, with haggard eye and moonstruck visage, bares
his aged head to the pattering rain--
'Loose his beard and hoary hair Stream like a meteor to the troubled
air.'
He makes feeble and fitful efforts to sweep a pathway across the road,

and the dashing cab pulls up suddenly just in time to save him from
being hurled to the ground by the horse. Then he gives it up as a vain
attempt, and leans, the model of despair, against the wall, and wrings
his skeleton fingers in agony--when just as a compassionate matron is
drawing the strings of her purse, stopping for her charitable purpose in
a storm of wind and rain, the voice of the policeman is heard over her
shoulder: 'What! you are here at it again, old chap? Well, I'm blowed if
I think anything 'll cure you. You'd better put up your pus, marm: if he
takes your money, I shall take him to the station-us, that's all. Now, old
chap--trot, trot, trot!' And away walks the old impostor, with a show of
activity perfectly marvellous for his years, the policeman following
close at his heels till he vanishes in the arched entry of a court.
The next specimen is perhaps a 'swell' out at elbows, a seedy and
somewhat ragged remnant of a very questionable kind of gentility--a
gentility engendered in 'coal-holes' and 'cider-cellars,' in 'shades,' and
such-like midnight 'kens'--suckled with brandy and water and port-wine
negus, and fed with deviled kidneys and toasted cheese. He has run to
the end of his tether, is cleaned out even to the last disposable shred of
his once well-stocked wardrobe; and after fifty high-flying and
desperate resolves, and twice fifty mean and sneaking devices to
victimise those who have the misfortune to be assailable by him, 'to this
complexion he has come at last.' He has made a track across the road,
rather a slovenly disturbance of the mud than a clearance of it; and
having finished his performance in a style to indicate that he is a
stranger to the business, being born to better things, he rears himself
with front erect and arms a-kimbo, with one foot advanced after the
approved statuesque model, and exhibits a face of scornful brass to an
unsympathising world, before whom he stands a monument of
neglected merit, and whom he doubtless expects to overwhelm with
unutterable shame for their abominable treatment of a man and a
brother--and a gentleman to boot. This sort of exhibition never lasts
long, it being a kind of standing-dish for which the public have very
little relish in this practical age. The 'swell' sweeper generally subsides
in a week or two, and vanishes from the stage, on which, however
ornamental, he is of very little use.

The occasional sweeper is much oftener a poor countryman, who has
wandered to London in search of employment, and, finding nothing
else, has spent his last fourpence in the purchase of a besom, with
which he hopes to earn a crust. Here his want of experience in town is
very much against him. You may know him instantly from the old
habitué of the streets: he plants himself in the very thick and throng of
the most crowded thoroughfare--the rapids, so to speak, of the human
current--where he is of no earthly use, but, on the contrary, very much
in the way, and where, while everybody wishes him at Jericho, he
wonders that nobody gives him a copper; or he undertakes