hear not a few extraordinary dialogues. A group, consisting of one or two of the dressers, a knot of sisters, a surgery man, and some of the pupils, is collected at the stair-head, and at intervals you catch unconnected portions of their mingled professional conversation. "So Sally Dawes is dead this morning." "Cuss the old cat; God be good to her, Betsy; what a world of trouble that wretch gived me in Mary's ward _never knowed when to have done calling for drink, night nor day." "Simon, have you got my blisters and poultices on your tray?" "Here's Goody Simpson's darter says as how she knows her mother's dead, an' a hollerin' like mad in the hairy: may she go up, sir?" ""Gainst the rules. Guvn'rs won't hear of it; tell her to call again to-morrow." "Hilloa, you there, come up, and carry down the stiff uns." "How many, sir?" "Let me see: Irish hodman, in Job's ward" -"Beg your pardon, sir, but he's not quite dead yet." "Not dead! you rascal, do you suppose I'd have given you an order to take him down if he wasn't dead." "Beg your pardon, sir, but he swears he won't die till God pleases." "Won't he? we shall see whether or not. There's Sally Dawes, she's dead as a red herring, I'll warrant her." "Mr Mugg, if the house surgeon hears you neglected to leech the erysipelas leg in No. 9, you'll hear of it." "Dear me, sir, what shall I do?" "Clap on the suckers, and when they bite, take them off again: say they're yesterday's bites." "That will be a bite; he! he! he!" "Staggers, I'll bet you two to five in grog, Slashem's lithotomy case capsizes the pail." "Say on the table, and I'll take you. Do you see any thing verdant?" "Oho!" "Two to one against the woman in the puerperal ward - what's her name ? Come, I'll back death against the doctor, for any sum you like to name." "Kitty Foley, if you please, sir, has made up her mind not to submit to the operation." "What! after I have had the trouble of arranging the instruments; there's gratitude for you! Tell her she must be operated on; the bill has been up this week; tell her she'll die if she doesn't." "She says, if you please, sir, she only wants to be let die in peace." ." "What! and the whole class to be disappointed; impossible! Tell "Not a Now, take a turn through the wards with the doctor. Observe how various the expression of the patients' countenances: the clouded brow, oppressed eye, distended nostril, and parched lip, of impending fever; the drunken aspect and stertorous breathing of apoplexy; the fearful shivering of the sufferer from ague; then, in the chronic wards, note the family likeness among all the patients-the subdued expression of pain, so long continued that habit has rendered its endurance tolerable. Now, if you have nerve, enter the condemned cell-the place allotted to incurables. Here are, you some five-and-twenty fellow creatures waiting for the friendly hand of death to lay them in the peaceful grave; and, strange to say, such of them as are not tortured with acute pain, are not merely resigned, but positively cheerful! see, Stand for a moment at the foot of this bed; let us look at the card. Oh! cancer of the breast, operated on for the third time yesterday. You observe the poor creature is dying: already unconsciousness has blunted the arrow of the destroyer; and although she yet breathes, the bitterness of death is past. These oranges and lemons, cups of wine, teapots, are the offerings of the inhabitants of the ward to their expiring fellow-sufferer. The little girl you see limping about with disease of the hip-joint, smiling as good-naturedly as if she was at play, was the nurse of the poor creature before you, and tended her with the same devotion as if she had been her own daughter. Even now, she moistens the unconscious lips, and whispers pity into the unheeding ear. There is something very extraordinary, and to us inexplicable, in the variety of shapes in which death makes his approaches, and the way in which he is met by minds differently constituted. In early life we had abundant opportunities of contemplating death on a great scale; and we took a melancholy pleasure in watching the struggles of the parting spirit, as if we could catch its shadow flung on earth, as it flew to its abiding-place beyond the grave. But, with all our watching, we never could advance a step in our investigation. We have seen a virtuous mother of a family, from whose hands the sacred volume was never absent during her long illness, expire delirious, with a torrent of blasphemy and obscenity horrible to hear. Over and over again we have witnessed the cheerful, and, to all human comprehension, happy deaths of those destitute of the slightest sense of religious obligation; while those imbued with the strongest and most scriptural feelings, have met death with tears, trem blings, and lamentations. Some we have observed to make the fact of their approaching death an excuse for imploring some delicacy which they have never tasted-as, for example, a peach or a bunch of grapes; others will cry out incessantly for wine, and die mi serable if they do not get as much as they wish. One would die happy, he says, if he could see the sun; another gives the moon his preference. The fantasies of dying people are truly extraordinary, and the mode in which they meet death, reconcilable, as we imagine, chiefly to constitution of body and habits of life. Soldiers, though by no means a religious class generally, we have observed to die fearless of death itself, whether or not indifferent to the preparation for the life after death. The happiest deaths, we think, other things being equal, are those of poor ignorant creatures, whose faith in their religion is unshaken. The pride of human knowledge suggests doubts and fears, which, howsoever little they may disturb lusty life, are worse than racks and wheels in the hour of approaching death. To be weak or undecided, in death as in life, is to be miserable. The firm in faith do not die-they set out upon their journey to the promised land and only change one state of existence for another. FUNERALS. People have an ominous dread of encountering funerals; now, for our own part, we like to meet a funeral; and, what is more, we find a melancholy pleasure in turning round and following it. Touches of genuine nature are to be met with at a funeral. The artificial is thrown aside, the mask we all wear in the business or pleasure of life falls off, and we are able sometimes to catch occasional glimpses of men as they really are, or ought to be. We say sometimes, for there is abundance of hypocrisy at a funeral as any where else, but even this is worth contemplating. There is much matter for conjecture in funerals; we like to imagine that we see reflected in the faces of the mourners what manner of man was the deceased. We try to puzzle out the expression of the disap. pointed legatee, and the more subdued grief of him, who, having been bequeathed much, regrets that he has not got more; or of him who, having the lion's share, is yet sorrowful that he had not the good fortune to have had all. Then there are the mourners, not of hoods, scarfs, and weepers, but of the heart-mourning a loss beyond that of the world's losses-losses no world's wealth can repair. The tender, dutiful wife, the prudent, affectionate husband, the son or daughter of our youth or of our age. The parent, dropping ripe into the lap of earth, or, deeper grief, cut off in the midst of his hopes, expectations, and pursuits, leaving perhaps a young family slenderly provided for, or not at all; the attached and long-esteemed friend, the woman we loved, or could have loved. These are the griefs, various in their expression, that, surrounding the yawning grave, pay the last sad offices to the unconscious dead; then slowly, and with downcast weeping eyes, wend slowly homewards their melancholy way. The funerals of the great, or little people who greatly unite themselves to dust, we have no sympathies with; we cannot get near enough to see of what kind of stuff their hearts are made; mourning coaches, plumed hearses, dusky-coated mutes, and the sable pomposity of the grave, do not attract us. But we are a rare hand at ferreting out a workhouse funeral: the poor corner of a metropolitan churchyard affords us many an afternoon's melancholy entertainment. The poor talk of one another, of the dead, of their affairs, the condition of their families. There is much apparent sympathy among them; and they have no care lest their conversation should be overheard. It was a fine summer Sabbath evening in June, and we were knocking about among the tombstones as usual, making our observations upon life and character, when our attention was arrested by a plain coffin, borne upon the shoulders of four men in black, and followed by eight chief mourners, all in decent but humble suits of sables. The chief mourners were eight children-four boys and four girls: or, to speak more correctly, three boys and three girls, with two little 'toddles,' mere infants, straggling in the rear. The eldest boy and girl might have been about fifteen and fourteen years respectively; the next, twelve and eleven; the third pair between seven and eight; the youngest, as we have said, between infancy and childhood. The eyes of all spectators were upon the bereaved ones as they stood around the grave, yawning to receive their only parent and provider; and few were the dry eyes of those that beheld the melancholy groupthe eldest boy looking fierce and man. like, the rest weeping bitterly, save the youngest pair, looking wonderingly around, as if marvelling what all the ceremony might mean. "Cutting funeral, that, sir;" observed a little pursy man in black who stood near us; "werry cutting funeral, indeed," repeated the little man, blowing his nose violently. "Who are they?" we enquired, not without anticipating something like "Yes, sir; she was a 'spectable woman-highly 'spectable, indeedwerry wirtuous, poor woman, sir-paid rates and taxes in the parish for twenty year. I ought to know it; for I'm one of the overseers - I am." "I should like to hear something of the family." "Should you, sir? Well, you shall hear; but it's a melancholy storywery melancholy, indeed. You must know, sir, there wasn't a more decenter couple in this parish than Thomas Mason and his wife, Jane -; they were well to do, and doing well; every body respected them, for they paid their way, and was civil to their customers. Well, Thomas fell in a decline, sir, and died; but he didn't die soon enough-for his sickness wasted all their substance, and the business was neglected, so the family fell into poverty: but the poor widow struggled on, and the exertions she made to maintain them little ones was really the wonder of the neighbour. hood. Mr Smith,' says she to me, when I offered some relief, 'I won't trouble this world long, and parish money shall never cross my palm; but when I'm gone, you won't see my desolate orphans want a morsel of bread.' So, poor woman, she was right; for she soon sickened, and was bed-ridden for thirteen months; and them children, as you see a standin' 'round their mother's grave, worked themselves to an oil to keep her from the hospital-much more the workus. The girls worked all day; and boys and girls sat up all night, turn and turn about, with their poor mothershe was sorely afflicted, poor woman. Well, sir; when she died at last, our vicar went and offered his assistance, and told the children, of course, the parish would bury their mother; but that there hobstinate boy, him that's a givin' his orders, wouldn't hear of it, and blowed up the vicar for mentioning such a thing. So the vicar comes to me, and says he, Mr Smith, these here young Mason's is the oddest babies as ever I see, for they've sold their bed and all their things to bury their mother; let's make up a purse for them, and there's my sovereign to begin with. Says I, sir, never mind, I'll bring them right; and the parish shall bury the poor woman, so that'll be so much saved; and with that I goes off to Poppin's court, and into the fust floor; there was the poor woman dead, and the room stripped of all the furniture and things. Says that there youth, Mr Smith,' says he, 'I'd be wery glad to see you another time, but we're in great grief for our mother bein' dead, and we hope you'il excuse us not askin' you to sit down.' Lord love you, sir, there wasn't the sign of a chair or a table in the room, nothing but the corpse, and a bit of a plank. Says I, 'my boy, I'm sorry for your grief, but I hope you wont have any objection to let the parish manage your poor mother's funeral.' With that, sir, the boy flares up like any think, whips up a poker, and swears if he catches the parish a-comin' to touch his mother, he'll brain the lot of 'em : Mother lived without the parish,' says he, 'died without the parish, and she'll be buried without the parish!' With that he opens the door, and shews me down stairs as if he was a suckin' markis: that's the story on 'em, sir; and they're a riggler hinde. pendent lot as ever I see. God help them, poor things!'" And with this the little man blew his nose once more, as the group of motherless children, reformed in their sad order of procession, and with streaming eyes, and many repeated last looks at their mother's grave, departed to their naked home. THE STOMACHS OF LONDON. About a month or two ago we gave the patient reader the slip-it was at Smithfield Bars, on a busy market morning. There is much to see, and something it may be to smell in Smithfield on a market morning. Its penned thousands of Liecesters, South Downs, and Merinos-its countless thousands of fatted swine-its multitudes of bleating lambs, pretty dears, so soon to be swallowed with mint sauce, salad, and the usual et ceteras its streets of living oxen, whose broad backs form a level leathery floor, over which you often see adventurous drovers, stick in hand, take their desperate way. Corpulent graziers, with leathern pocket-book crammed with bank of England notes: enterprizing knackers, wholesale dealers in that favourite article of food-horse flesh, subsequently retailed to the lieges in à la mode beef, mutton pies, sausages, and a variety of other fancy costumes: lynx-eyed salesmen, who have but to glance at a beast to know how many stone he weighs, offal inclusive: journeymen butchers looking for a job: policemen on the scent after a roving pickpocket: chawbacons in smockfrocks, munching bread and cheese, or gazing listlessly around from the secure eminence of a waggon-load of hay: shepherds and drovers from all quarters of the agricultural world, and you have a morning at Smith field. Truly, ravenous reader, it is a good ly stomach that same Smithfield; like our own, empty as a gallipot the greater part of the week, but filled even to repletion upon market days. In our case, you will understand market day to be that when some hospi table Christian, pitying our forlorn condition, delights our ears, warming the cockles of our heart with a provoke; when, be assured, we eat and drink indictively, like an author at his publisher's! The shepherds and their dogs, we delight to contemplate. Strictly speaking, there is nothing Arcadian about either master or colley-both are the roughest-looking creatures you ever beheld; but there is something about the physiognomy of shepherds that interests and pleases us a dreamy look, such as poets may wear, the result most likely of a lone life upon the hills, and much more companionship with nature than with man. Take that tall, erect fellow, for example, leaning against the rails where are penned some ten score of black cattle; even if you overlook his plaided scarf, there is enough of nationality in his ample forehead, skirted by thin sandy hair, his clear azure eye, and high cheekbones, to assure you he is a descendant of the Picts. He has no pipe, like your British shepherd, but applies the "sneeshin-mull" ever and anon to his proboscis. His dog, queer frizzly beast, but no more a bumpkin than his master, sits, taking unwonted rest, upon his tailless hunkers, but ever and anon turns his head, quick and sharp, in the direction of the "blackfaces," over whom, for many a weary league, he was posted as whipper-in or adjutant. Now the shepherd, tired of leaning against the rail, goes over to an old woman's book-stall, turning over and cheapening the volumes. See, the colley follows, looking up into his master's visage with erudite nose. No doubt on't, that cur is familiar with books; and we should be no whit astonished to find him, upon examination, as well read as many a cockney. Now, if you please, reader, we will be off, for although our clothes cannot suffer, yet the concussion of greasy butchers, drovers, raggamuffins, and the like, may contaminate, by spot or stain, your unexceptionable "rig out." Before we leave the market, however, let us step up stairs to the first floor room of the "Cock and Gooseberry," and take a coup-d'œil of the busy scene from the window. What a paradise of beef! What snow-clad vales of mutton! What an undulatory sea of swine, tossing and tumbling like Neptune in his sleep, though rather less melodious! There, sir, you behold neither more nor less than dinner for three-days of the capacious maw of universal London. What do we say? Where is Newgate market, mighty in butcher meat? - where Leadenhall, tremendous in turkeys? - where Billingsgate, alive with finny prey? Scaly reader, we have eaten nothing, positively nothing; let us be off to Billingsgate for a fin of fish-take our poultry on our way back at Leadenhall-spoil a baron of beef at Newgate, and consume at Covent Garden our hors d'œuvres and dessert. When you reach the Monument on Fish Street Hill, you have only to follow your nose; find Billingsgate by the scent, regaled with every variety of "ancient and fish-like smell:" Lochfine herrings; Dutch ditto, swimming in seas of crimsoned brine; Finnan haddies, lying on the flat of their backs, inviting purchasers; Yarmouth bloaters; split salmon, of which you may command even a solitary rasher, if you have the twopenny-worth of circulating "browns" wherewith to remunerate the vender for the same ; in brief, you proceed through a leading thoroughfare of dried fish, until you arrive at a small incommodious and pitiful little hole, like the dirty dock wharf of a provincial seaport. Have a care of looking round, or you will probably break your shins over a retail lot of shrimps, lobsters, or flatfish, refuse of the morning's market. But this is Billingsgate. If you happen to be a Liverpool man, you will turn up your nose with contempt, and invite us to express our approbation of your fish-market. And so, with a safe conscience, we may; for never did we see any piscatory mart that was not, to use an expression borrowed from Billingsgate, a scaly concern in comparison. But, my dear sir, recollect that Billingsgate is not a fish-market, but a fish-warehouse-a place of import-a great fish exchange. The market is in the three thousand fishmongers'shops, (we have counted here five hundred carts on one morning at one time,) of every neighbourhood in and about the metropolis; yea, as far as railways can carry the article in a saleable condition. Business is carried on here, as every where else throughout London, where a large amount of business has to be done in a short space of timethat is to say, by factors, who expose lots suited to the wants or means of intending purchasers by auction, which are purchased either by the retail dealer in person, or by his commission agent. By this expeditious process the market is opened, cleare closed within a few hours: in summer, before the regular working day begins. and At one o'clock P.M. every day, under the auspices of the landlord of the Three Tuns, within the market is served up a truly substantial and excellent fish dinner, but different, indeed, both as to cooking and charges, from the more costly and recherche feeds at Greenwich or Blackwall. The banquet consists of a variety of whatever fish may be in season and abundance. If turbot happens to have been a drug in the market the morning of the day you dine, then you may expect turbot; if cod, you will be sure to have a slice from a magnificent head and shoulders, cooked in the plain old English fashion. After this, you will be served with a substantial joint of roast or boiled, with customary trimmings. Your dinner costs you eighteenpence; and if you take a nip of brandy, |