314 NOVEMBER. 



months, and again issuing into the country, behold the 

 same figures, the same groups, come streaming along 

 our principal roads, that we have encountered there 

 through all the days of our lives, and that Bewick 

 has depicted in his living sketches, I have a most in- 

 ternal satisfaction in the inexhaustible vagabonds. 



There is one class of them that I freely give up, 

 although the rogues have a spice of romance about 

 them, the vagabonds par excellence, those clever, 

 able, and eloquent fellows, that can lose a limb or 

 even an eye at will ; sailors who never saw the sea ; 

 decayed tradesmen who never had a groat honestly 

 acquired ; men of fictitious miseries, who are most 

 at home on the road or in the lodging-house, and 

 who live upon the pity of the simple ; for them I ask 

 TZO pity. 



Then there are those little, nomadic merchants, 

 that from every large town diverge in all directions, 

 and penetrate to every village and lonely house with 

 their wares. There is the chair-bottomer, with his 

 great sheaf of rushes on his back, who, seated on 

 the sunny side of the farm-door, or under the shade 

 of a tree, as the season may require, enriches the 

 good people with news worth more than his work. 

 There is the wandering milliner, an old woman of 

 the true picturesque school, short, broad, plentiful in 

 her own attire of coat, apron, and petticoats, with 

 her strong staff in her hand, her spacious, weather- 

 beaten face, and a great cage-like basket of open 

 wicker-work on her back, large enough to hold her- 

 self: and beside these, sundry bearers of shallow 



