Chamberss Edinburgh Journal, No. 448 | Page 7

in the metropolis on the subject of the duty which respectable people owe to respectability. It is impossible for a housekeeper in a neighbourhood having any claims to gentility, to escape the recognition of this feeling in the lower class of industrials. If you have a broken window in the front of your house, the travelling glazier thinks, to use his own expression, that you have a right to have it repaired, and therefore that he, having discovered the fracture, has a right to the job of mending it. If your bell-handle is out of order or broken off, the travelling bellman thinks he has a right to repair it, and bores you, in fact, until you commission him to do so--and so on. In the same manner, and on the same principle, so soon as the fine weather sets in, and the front-gardens begin to look gay, the graveller loads his cart with gravel, and shouldering his spade, crawls leisurely through the suburbs with his companion, peering into every garden; and wherever he sees that the walks are grown dingy or moss-grown, he knocks boldly at the door, and demands to be set to work in mending your ways. The best thing you can do is to make the bargain and employ him at once; if not, he will be round again to-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow, and bore you into consenting at last. You live in a respectable house, and you have a right to keep your garden in a respectable condition--and the graveller is determined that you shall do so: has he not brought gravel to the door on purpose? it will cost you but a shilling or two. Thus he lays down the law in his own mind; and sooner or later, as sure as fate, he lays down the gravel in your garden.
While the graveller is patting down the pathway round Robinson's flower-bed, we hear the well-known cry of a countryman whom we have known any time these ten years, and who, with his wife by his side, has perambulated the suburbs for the best part of his life. He has taken upon himself the patronage of the laundry department, and he shoulders a fagot of clothes-poles, ten feet long, with forked extremities, all freshly cut from the forest. Coils of new rope for drying are hanging upon his arm, and his wife carries a basket well stocked with clothes-pins of a superior description, manufactured by themselves. The cry of 'Clo'-pole-line-pins' is one long familiar to the neighbourhood; and as this honest couple have earned a good reputation by a long course of civility and probity, they enjoy the advantage of a pretty extensive connection. Their perambulations are confined to the suburbs, and it is a question if they ever enter London proper from one year's end to another. It is of no use to carry clothes-poles and drying-lines where there are no conveniences for washing and drying.
Next comes a travelling umbrella-mender, fagoted on the back like the man in the moon of the nursery rhyme-book. He is followed at a short distance by a travelling tinker, swinging his live-coals in a sort of tin censer, and giving utterance to a hoarse and horrible cry, intelligible only to the cook who has a leaky sauce-pan. Then comes the chamois-leather woman, bundled about with damaged skins, in request for the polishing of plate and plated wares. She is one of that persevering class who will hardly take 'No' for an answer. It takes her a full hour to get through the terrace, for she enters every garden, and knocks at every door from No. 1 to No. 30. In the winter-time, she pursues an analogous trade, dealing in what may strictly be termed the raw material, inasmuch as she then buys and cries hare-skins and rabbit-skins. She has, unfortunately, a notoriously bad character, and is accused of being addicted to the practice of taking tenpence and a hare-skin in exchange for a counterfeit shilling.
By this time it is twelve o'clock and past, and Charley Coster, who serves the terrace with vegetables, drives up his stout cob to the door, and is at the very moment we write bargaining with Betty for new potatoes at threepence-half-penny a pound. Betty declares it is a scandalous price for potatoes. 'Yes, dear,' says Charley; 'an' another scanlous thing is, that I can't sell 'em for no less.' Charley is the most affectionate of costers, and is a general favourite with the abigails of the terrace. His turn-out is the very model of a travelling green-grocer's shop, well stocked with all the fruits and vegetables of the season; and he himself is a model of a coster, clean shaved, clean shod, and trimly dressed, with a flower in his button-hole, an