Not to prolong these notes of uncommercial
travel among the lower animals of shy neighbourhoods,
by dwelling at length upon the exasperated
moodiness of the tom-cats, and their resemblance
in many respects to a man and a
brother, I will come to a close with a word on
the fowls of the same localities.

That anything born of an egg and invested
with wings, should have got to the pass that it
hops contentedly down a ladder into a cellar,
and calls that going home, is a circumstance
so amazing as to leave one nothing more in this
connexion to wonder at. Otherwise I might
wonder at the completeness with which these
fowls have become separated from all the birds
of the air— have taken to grovelling in bricks
and mortar and mud— have forgotten all about
live trees, and make roosting-places of shop-
boards, barrows, oyster-tubs, bulk-heads, and
door-scrapers. I wonder at nothing concerning
them, and take them as they are. I accept as
products of Nature and things of course, a
reduced Bantam family of my acquaintance in the
Hackney-road, who are incessantly at the pawn-
broker's. I cannot say that they enjoy themselves,
for they are of a melancholy temperament;
but what enjoyment they are capable of,
they derive from crowding together in the pawn-
broker's side-entry. Here, they are always to be
found a feeble flutter, as if they were newly
come down in the world, and were afraid of
being identified. I know a low fellow, originally
of a good family from Dorking, who takes his
whole establishment of wives, in single file, in at
the door of the Jug Department of a disorderly
tavern near the Haymarket, manoeuvres them
among the company's legs, emerges with them
at the Bottle Entrance, and so passes his life:
seldom, in the season, going to bed before
two in the morning. Over Waterloo-bridge,
there is a shabby old speckled couple (they
belong to the wooden French-bedstead, washing-
stand, and towel-horse-making trade), who
are always trying to get in at the door of a
chapel. Whether the old lady, under a delusion
reminding one of Mrs. Southcott, has an
idea of entrusting an egg to that particular
denomination, or merely understands that she
has no business in the building, and is
consequently frantic to enter it, I cannot determine;
but she is constantly endeavouring to undermine
the principal door: while her partner, who is
infirm upon his legs, walks up and down,
encouraging her and defying the Universe. But
the family I have been best acquainted with, since
the removal from this trying sphere of a Chinese
circle at Brentford, reside in the densest part of
Bethnal-green. Their abstraction from the
objects among which they live, or rather their
conviction that those objects have all come into
existence in express subservience to fowls, has
so enchanted me, that I have made them the
subject of many journeys at divers hours. After
careful observation of the two lords and the ten
ladies of whom this family consists, I have come
to the conclusion that their opinions are
represented by the leading lord and leading lady: the
latter, as I judge, an aged personage, afflicted
with a paucity of feather and visibility of quill,
that gives her the appearance of a bundle of
office pens. When a railway goods-van that
would crush an elephant comes round the corner,
tearing over these fowls, they emerge unharmed
from under the horses, perfectly satisfied that
the whole rush was a passing property in the air,
which may have left something to eat behind it.
They look upon old shoes, wrecks of kettles and
saucepans, and fragments of bonnets, as a kind
of meteoric discharge, for fowls to peck at. Peg-
tops and hoops they account, I think, as a sort
of hail; shuttlecocks, as rain, or dew. Gaslight
comes quite as natural to them as any other
light; and I have more than a suspicion that, in
the minds of the two lords, the early public-
house at the corner has superseded the sun.
I have established it as a certain fact, that they
always begin to crow when the public-house
shutters begin to be taken down, and that they
salute the potboy, the instant he appears to
perform that duty, as if he were Phoebus in
person.

MASTER AND MAN.
I.

As I glide over the hilly landscape, blurred
with smoke, of Lancashire, it is wonderful
to think how little London knows about
these forests of chimneys; these hundred-windowed
mills; this vast district, where there
is no silent solitude; for the burr of working
wheels and cranks, following the traveller over
hill and valley, never deserts his ear during a
single minute. Dry figures and descriptions of
machinery have travelled hence all the world
over. Vast are the blue-books about cotton
supply. But I am to do without tables. The
law of supply and demand is not to fall under
my critical eye. It is my simple business to
keep my eyes wide open.

I taper the point of my pencil hopefully, as
I sweep along the iron high road, to which
every cotton-spinner owes a liberal gratitude.
At every little station eager men leap out of the
train, and hurry towards the mills; at every
station the hedges are ragged with flakes of
cotton. Men nod rapidly to one another;
jump unceremoniously from the railway-
carriage without saying good morning to a
friend, and hand their tickets to the porters
with their teeth, while they grasp their
luggage. They have, probably, just half an
hour to spend in the town they have reached,
and, during; this time, have to make heavy
bargains. It is two o'clock: by six they must be
a hundred and twenty miles off. Time is too
valuable to be spent on ceremony; and so
ceremony is put aside, while the good feeling
which is at the back of all wholesome ceremony
is kept in the heart. The black coat does not
secure reverent eyes. A gentleman, driving
through Accrington in a gig, asked a factory
lad the road to Bacup. The lad looked sharply
at his questioner. He must have value received
for any information he afforded: