never detect the imposture. Besides, he is the most courteous of petitioners for alms, never importunate, and from the "Thank you" for ha'pence, "Thank you, much obliged to you." for sixpence, to the "Thank you, sir! Much obliged to you, sir! God repay you, sir!" for a shilling, is the best bred of beggars.
I have introduced Billy Bottom because he stands the acknowledged head of more than sixty thousand professed beggars in London. He is wise. He does not drink. He assumes no disguise. He has a wife and family whom he supports respectably. In fact, he is not unlike, save in the misfortune of being born without legs, his great predecessor, John Yardley Vernon, who died many years ago in Broad street. Vernon left more than £100,000. But he made it by speculating with the proceeds of his begging. Though never appearing in public, save in his rags, he left several sons who took care of his gains.
Henry Mayhew, the eccentric philanthropist, classifies London beggars into nine distinct species, but even these fail to include them all. In his endeavors to benefit the London poor, he called a meeting of mendicants, advertising it at Seven Dials, and promising that no policeman should be present. More than one hundred and fifty attended. It was a spectacle of squalor, rags, and wretchedness. Some were young men, some middle-aged, and some children. One who styled himself a "cadger" was only six, and several who confessed to being "prigs" were under ten. At first the meeting was noisy, and howls, cat-calls, brays, and yells threatened to render all attempts at order abortive. One whinnied like a horse, and immediately the whole hundred and fifty whinnied in concert. Another crowed like a cock, whereupon the room echoed with a hundred and fifty cock-crows. It was a menagerie at feeding-time. A black boy entered, and a hundred voices cried out, "Sweep O"—a blind fiddler followed, and "Strike up, catgut," "Flare up, never-sweat," resounded through the place, amid peals of laughter. The answers as to the number of imprisonments each had suffered produced silence for a time, but when one vagabond of fourteen confessed to twenty-nine convictions, the clapping of hands, cat-calls, and shouts of "bray-vo" lasted for several minutes. More than a hundred had read "Jack Sheppard" and the "Newgate Calendar," and in answer to the question as to what they thought of Jack Sheppard the answer was universal, "He's a brick." A ballad writer who was present, made the following curious confession:
The little knowledge I have, I have picked up bit by bit, so that I hardly know how I have come by it. I certainly knew my letters before I left home, and I have got the rest off the walls. I write Newgate ballads for the printers at the Dials. I got a shilling for a "copy of verses written by the wretched culprit the night before he was hung." I wrote Courvoisier's lamentation, and called it "A woice from the Gaol." I wrote a pathetic ballad on the respite of Annette Meyers. I did the helegy, too, on Rush's execution; it was supposed, like the rest, to be written by the culprit himself, and was particularly penitent. I didn't write that to horder—I knew they would want it. The publisher read it over, and said, "That's the thing for the street." I only got a shilling for Rush. Indeed, they are all the same price, no matter how popular they may be. I wrote the life of Manning in verse. Besides these, I have written the lament of Calcraft, the hangman, on the decline of his trade.
"The Rookery," where this meeting was held, is a dense mass of houses in the neighborhood of St. Giles, through which curve tortuous lanes, from which again diverge close courts—one great maze, as if the houses had been originally of one block of stone, eaten by slugs into numberless small chambers and connecting passages. The lanes are thronged with loiterers, and the air poisoned
