this Victoria Sewer would have paid for the
drainage of the whole of Westminster proper,
according to the opposite system.

THE COMPASSIONATE BROKER.

HARD lines— stern and grim avocations—
do not necessarily make hard men. On the
contrary, it would .seem as though the constant
contemplation of pain and suffering had
a tendency to soften rather than indurate
the heart of the beholder. Butchers are
not always sanguinary; but are ordinarily
tender-hearted men. Grisly soldiers and
sailors are gentle and lamb-like with children.
Burly dustmen and coalheavers are, save
when, excited with the furor of alcohol,
men of a meek and peaceable demeanour.
Turnkeys and gaolers, generally, are mild and
benign men, full of quiet suggestions for the
prisoner's comforts. The majority of prize-
fighters are slow to take offence, and loath to
use their terrible weapons. Indeed, with the
exception of relieving-officers, slave-dealers,
plaintiff's-attorneys, some schoolmasters, bill-
discounters, and secretaries of loan societies,
it is rare to find men who at all partake of
the hardness of the callings they are compelled
to follow. Much belied as this poor human
nature is, those who delight in the infliction
of pain, and the spectacle of misery, for their
own sakes, are very very few. Nero, Governor
Wall, and Mrs. Brownrigg, are yet
monsters.

Now of all hardest, stoniest, sternest lines
a man can well follow, commend me to that
of an auctioneer, broker, and appraiser. To
be a George Robins, a Musgrove and Gadsden,
a Cafe, Sons, and Reed, must be hard enough
to a man of sensitive feelings. To have to
sell the broad green acres that have been in
the good old family for generations and generations,
to have to build one's auctioneering
nest in the scathed branches of the old mahogany
tree, and knock down, one by one, the
withered blossoms of friendship and hospitality,
and love; to see the Turkey carpets
rolled up, and the pictures turned with their
faces to the wall; to value the goblets that
have held a thousand loving pledges, and the
heir-looms that have been won by wisdom
and bravery, only as so much metal, at so
much per ounce; to solicit an advance on the
marriage bed, and turn up the grand.sire's
arm-chair, that a Hebrew upholsterer, from
Finsbury Pavement, may inspect its castors;
to hammer the pearls out of the coronet, and
draw the bar-sinister of poverty across the
time-honoured scutcheon; to draw up the
death- warrant of the pride and wealth and
comfort of a family in a catalogue—reckoning
the choicest household treasures, the Lares
and Penates of the hearth; the old lord's
velvet crutch, the heir's cricket bat, when he
was a boy, the heiress's bird-cage, only as so
many lots—all this must be hard and cruel
enough; and as the auctioneer's hammer in
its verberations seems but to punctuate the
text that Favour is deceitful and beauty vain,
and that there is no profit under the sun, the
auctioneer himself must sigh.

But when, as is the case in the provinces,
the auctioneer is also a broker and valuer,
when he seizes as well as sells; when
he is not only favoured with instructions
to sell, but commanded, with her Majesty's
greeting, to impound under the sheriff's
levy, the vocation becomes doubly painful,
doubly melancholy. The auctioneer becomes
the undertaker of the family happiness, and
with his hammer nails up the coffin of their
hopes. He comes, not of himself, but by the
law, to strip the widow and the orphan, and
despoil the fatherless. The bed is his, the
ticking clock, the little old miniature on the
mantle, the few books on the hanging shelf,
the bright pots and pans, the father's gun,
the children's little go-cart. He can take the
hearth-rug from under the cat, and though
that domestic animal herself is beneath his
notice, if she had a brass collar it would be
his, and down as an item in the inventory in
a moment. To seize the poor man's sticks is
utterly to beggar and crush him, to scrape
him as clean as a forked radish, to knock the
poor edifice of his bien-être as completely
about his ears, as the housemaid's broom
demolishes the spider's web; aye, but without
having the power to re-construct his web, as
the spider can. But though hard, it is the
law; and the law must be obeyed; and we
must do our duty, as Lile Jack Scotforth
of Dodderham said.

Lile Jack* had sold up some hundreds of
families in his time. He, a man of toast and
butter, a man with a heart so soft and big
and porous, that it was continually sucking
up milk and honey, and continually being
squeezed by the fingers of sympathy for the
benefit of those about him, and continually
ready to imbibe, and be squeezed again—he
had been in possession times out of number.
He, who not only prayed for his daily bread,
but shared it with his hungry neighbour,
was the almost daily exponent of the writ of
Fi. fa. Each distress he put in, was a distress
to him; inventories were so many penitential
psalms to him; but what was to be done?
If landlords wouldn't wait, the law, so hasty
in taking, so tardy in restoring, could not
afford to wait a moment either, you may be
sure, and " if you cannot get meal you mun
tak' malt, an' sell the creeturs up," said Lile
Jack with a sigh.

Auctioneering, among the middle classes,
the good man took to more kindly. Among
the peculiarities of Dodderham folk is a strong
predilection for attending sales, and bidding
for articles thereat. Little Miss Ogle, the
confectioner, has quite a museum of articles she
has picked up at sales—Chinese slippers, boxes
of cigars, harness, gas-fittings, and other

* See page 9 of the present Volume.