Jifkins, the sporting publican, dashes along
in a very knowing gig, drawn by a fast-trotting
mare, which has been winning something
considerable lately, and stands to win more.
With Jifkins is his friend Skudder, the
horse-dealer, and the two are bound to Barnet
to look at a little oss that can do wonderful
things, and is to be parted with for a mere
song—a song with a good many verses though,
I daresay. Young Timbs, and three other
youths, clerks—I beg pardon, civil servants
of the crown—in the Irish Bog Reclamation
Commission office, have hired a dog-cart for
the day to drive down to Staines. Young
Timbs will drive, but the horse is not a mild-
tempered horse, and isn't at all comfortable
about the mouth, and seems unaccountably
disposed to go sideways and down areas. The
little ragged Bohemian boys, who in their
dirt and destitution stand out wofully against
the well-dressed Sunday makers, chaff Timbs
sorely; but he drives on manfully, and the
horse is touched with repentance or whipped
and jerked into good humour occasionally,
and goes along for a hundred yards or so
quite at a rattling pace. More fortunate in
equine matters is Mr. Coupon, the stockbroker's
clerk, who is having three half-crowns'
worth of a monumental white horse,
and manages him so gracefully that spectators
turn round to look at him. Coupon is
faultlessly dressed. His boot-heels are garnished
with Maxwell's spur-boxes; he wears no
straps, carries no whip—no instrument of
correction save a short stick. He will ride into
the park; he will put the monumental horse
into a canter; he will draw up with the
other horsemen and take off his hat when
her Majesty passes. He will ride gravely
past Mr. Decimus Burton's arch and down
Piccadilly at dusk, majestically, as though he
were accustomed to press the sides of a coal-
black charger with buckskins and jack-boots
—thoughtfully, as though there were dozens
of red boxes filled with despatches in cipher
awaiting his perusal, and two cabinet councils
for him to attend to-morrow at the Foreign
Office. Then he will take the monumental
horse to the livery stable-keeper's in the back
street and pay his three half-crowns, and will
have been happy.

The Sunday pedestrians I note are quite
as remarkable in their way as the Sunday
equestrians or riders in vehicles. The
numbers of brightly-dressed people who
throng the pavements is amazing. Shade of
Sartor Resartus, where do all these coats
come from? These brilliant bonnets, these
variegated silks, these rustling tarlatans,
those transparent baréges, these elaborately-
worked shirtfronts, these resplendent parasols?
Can there be any misery, or pauperism,
or poverty in London? Can any of these
thousands of well-dressed people have debts,
or executions in their houses, or be thinking
of pawning their spoons? The most wonderful
thing is that you may wander for hours in
the Sunday streets without meeting any one
that you know. Nobody seems to go out on
Sunday, yet everybody is out. Everybody
seems to have wives, and families, or
sweethearts, except yourself. And the boys, the
marvellous, well-dressed boys! They swagger
along, four, five abreast. Their hair shines
with pomatum; they have cutaway coats,
bran new, of bright brown, bright green,
bright blue. They have meteoric waistcoats,
and neckcloths like fiery comets. Their hats
are of the newest, shiniest, silkiest. They
have silver watches, walking-sticks with
elaborate knobs. They all smoke. Everybody
smokes. Smoke seems, with gay
colours, to be a part of Sunday; and now I
can understand why the Manchester
warehouses in St. Paul's Churchyard are so vast,
and extend so far under ground; and how it
is that the excise duty on tobacco forms so
considerable a branch of the revenue. Sunday
out does it all. And the girls! I don't
mean the grown-up young ladies. We are
favoured with the sight of those dear
creatures, their ringlets, their ravishing toilettes,
the sparkling little purses which they will
persist in carrying in their hands, in a
mistaken notion of security, and as persistently
keep losing—on weekdays as well as Sundays;
but Sunday out daisyfies the pavements with
groups of girls of twelve and fourteen or
thereabouts; gaily attired girls, girls in
plaited tails and sashes, and trowsers with lace
borders; girls profoundly critical on each
other's bonnets, and jealous of each other's
parasols; girls who hold lively conversations
audible as you pass them, about what Polly
said to me said she, and how an appeal, en
dernier ressort, had to be made to mother;
girls ordinarily seised of the custody of other
little girls with little parasols, or of some
punchy big-pated little boy, not much higher
than the dogs which pass and eye him
wonderingly,—children who wo'nt come along,
and become tired, and desirous of being
carried at unseasonable times, and sometimes
break out into open rebellion and lachrymatory
roars, rendering the employment of
the parasol handles as weapons of coercion,
occasionally necessary. Dear me! what a
deal all these young people have to talk
about!

Slowly walking through the most crowded
streets I can find towards the market of
Hungerford, I see many and think of more
indications of Sunday in as well as Sunday
out. Sunday in, stands ascetically at his
parlour window, flattening his nose against
the pane, and gazing at the merry crowd as
Mr. Bunyan might have looked at the booths
in Vanity Fair. Sunday in, contented but
lazy, reposes behind his Venetian blinds, his
legs on a chair, his hands folded, and a silk
pocket-handkerchief thrown over his head to
keep away the flies. Sunday in, convivial but
solitary, has half-opened the window, and sits
with his cold gin-and-water, and his newspaper