measures, and his balls into bagatelle balls, sold
them to Scrutor, the broker, aud Buffo himself
to Joe (surname unknown) who is a helper
up Spavins' yard, the livery and bait stables,
in Blitsom Street. Joe " knowed of a lady
down Kensington who was werry nuts
upon poodles; " and Buffo previous to his
introduction to the lady amateur, was
subjected to sundry dreadful operations of
farriery, in the way of clipping, staining, and
curtailing, which made him from that day
forward a dog of sullen and morose temper.
He soon came back from Kensington in
disgrace, the alleged cause of his dismissal being
his having fought with and killed a gray
cockatoo. He was re-sold to Mrs. Lazenby,
old Mr. Fazzle's housekeeper; but he had
either forgotten or was too misanthropic to
perform any of his old tricks, regarded
policemen unmoved, and passed the whole
pack of cards with profound disdain. A
report, too, founded on an inadvertent
remark of Chapford, that he (Buffo) had once
been on the stage, and had been fired out of
a cannon by the clown in a pantomime,
succeeded in ruining him in the opinion of
the Rents, who hold all " play-actors " in
horror:  he passed from owner to owner, and
was successively kicked out and discarded by
all, and now hangs about Chapford's, a shabby,
used-up, degraded, broken-down beast.

Is there anything more pitiable in animal
nature than a thoroughly hard-up dog?
Such a one I met two Sundays back in a
shiningly genteel street in Pimlico. He was
a cur, most wretchedly attenuated, and there
in Pimlico he sat, with elongated jaws, his
head on one side, his eyes wofully upturned,
his haunches turned out, his feet together,
his tail subdued, his ribs rampant: an utterly
worn out, broken down, ruined old dog. If
he had taken a piece of chalk, and written
"I am starving," fifty times on the pavement
in the most ornamental caligraphy,
it could not have excited more sympathy
than the unutterable expression of his
oblique misery, propped up sideways against a
kitchen railing. I had no sooner stopped to
accost him, than, taking it for granted that I
was going to kick him or beat him because he
was miserable, he shambled meekly into the
gutter, where he stood shivering; but I
spoke him fair, and addressing him in what
little I knew of the Doggee language, strove
to reassure him. But how could I relieve
him? What could I do for him? It was a
stern uncompromising shining British Sunday;
there was no back slum nigh; no lowly
shop, whither I could convey him to regale
on dog's meat. Moreover it was church
time, and I could not even purchase licensed
victuals for his succour. It was no good
giving him a penny. I might as well have
given him a tract. He was unmistakeably
mangy, and I could not convey him home;
and I knew of no dog-hospital. So I
exhorted him to patience and resignation, and
left him reluctantly; persuaded that the
greatest charity I could have extended to
him would have been to blow his brains
out.

You are not to think that these I
have mentioned are all the dogs of which
Tattyboys Rents can boast. Many more are
they, big dogs and little dogs: from that
corpulent Newfoundland dog of Scrutor's, the
broker, whose sagacity is so astounding as to
lead to his being trusted with baskets and
cash, to purchase bread and butcher's meat—
the which he does faithfully, bringing back
change with scrupulous exactitude—and
whose only fault is his rapid rate of locomotion,
and defective vision, which lead him to
run up against and upset very nearly everybody
he meets in his journeys—to Bob
Blather, the barber's, cock-tail terrier, which
can kill a " power of rats," and has more than
once been matched in Bell's Life (familiarly
called by the sporting part of the Rents, The
Life) to do so. I may say to the honour
of the dogs of Tattyboys Rents, that they
seldom stray beyond its limits; and that
if any strange dog descend the steps leading
thereunto, they invariably fall upon, and
strive to demolish him with the utmost
ferocity.

The children of the Rents are so much
like other street children that they preserve
the same traditions of street games and songs
common to other localities. They are remarkable,
however, for a certain grave and sedate
demeanour which I have never failed to
observe in children who are in the habit of
sitting much upon flights of steps. Such
steps are the sands of life, and the sea of the
street rolls on before them. The steps of
Tattyboys Rents are to the children there
a place of deliberation, recreation, observation,
and repose. There, is to-morrow's lesson
studied; there, does the baby learn a viva-voce
lesson in walking; there, is the dirt pie made,
and the sharp pointed " cat " constructed;
there, does the nurse child rest, and the little
maid achieve her task of sewing; there, are
tops wound, and marbles gambled for, and
juvenile scandals promulgated; there, is the
quarrel engendered, and the difference
adjusted. It is good to see this La Scala of
Tattyboys Rents on a sunshiny day; its
degrees sown with little people, whose juvenile
talk falls cheerfully on the ear after the ruder
conversation at the posts. The posts are
immediately behind the steps, forming a grove
of egress,—a sort of forest of Soignies, behind
the Mont Saint Jean of the Rents,—into
Blitsom Street. At the posts, is Wapford's
beershop; pots are tossed for at the posts,
and bets are made on horseraces. Many a
married woman in the Rents "drats" the
posts, at whose door she lays the Saturday
night vagaries of her " master; " forgetting
how many of her own sex are postally
guilty, and how often she herself has stood
a gossiping at the posts.