The palmy days of Strawberry Street were now passing away, and its pretensions were evidently on the decline. The professional ladies and gentlemen moved by degrees further north, and their places were supplied by a new class -by tradesmen's clerks, by foremen and overseers of workshops, men of a hundred a year and no leisure, who came home at all hours of the night, and let themselves out in the dark mornings of winter long before sunrising, and who let lodgings to help to pay the rent. Here and there the muslin-blind disappeared from the front-parlour window, and revealed such things as a Wellington boot beautifully "treed" and polished; a last covered with a little Switzerland of bunions; a set of milkwhite ivory piano-keys; a case of brilliant razors; or a few small panels exquisitely painted in imitation of oak, mahogany, or sandal-wood: all so many indications that the dwellers within lived by the labour of their hands, and would be happy to take your orders. These were but the signs of a further change that was coming. Already a tall brick chimney, only a few score yards from the southern end of the street, had risen so high in the air as to overlook its whole area, and was daily mounting higher; and already men in splashed aprons and shirt-sleeves would be occasionally met strolling in bands through Strawberry Street on their way home from work. And now long ranks of cottages, not twenty feet apart, sprung up like mushrooms in the waste ground on the eastern side. These were inhabited almost as soon as built, by a class who did not trouble their heads about gentility at all, but who speedily found out the Fox and Salutation, whose landlord turned the large parlour into a taproom for their accommodation, to the hearty indignation and disgust of his old customers.

Suddenly, one winter's morning, the tall chimney, from which the scaffolding had disappeared a few days before, began sending forth a volume of black smoke, which dark

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ened the whole neighbourhood, and set all the world, and Strawberry Street in particular, complaining of the nuisance, and talking of lawsuits and indictments against the proprietor. This disagreeable surprise was followed by another hardly less welcome to the remnant of exclusives who were still dwellers in the street. For some days, alterations had been going on in the house that once was Mr. Pottinger's, under cover of a tall hoarding, which being at length taken down, displayed the broad front of what is called a "generalshop," surmounted by the name, painted under the cornice in letters a foot long, of Mrs. Murgatroyd. This lady, whose touching habit it was to describe herself as a lone woman," was a strapping creature of five feet nine, and of corresponding circumference, but active and pushing withal, and experienced in the ways of the world. Her shop, which contained every thing that a man who wore a leathern apron, or the wife and family of such a man, could possibly want, immediately became the resort of the whole of the "hand to mouth" class of the neighbourhood, and the focus of more gossip than had ever emanated from that part of the world before. Mrs. Murgatroyd gave credit, on a principle of her own, to those who, from temporary loss of employment, or misfortune, stood in need of it; and thus secured in prosperous times the gratitude and patronage of those whom she assisted in adversity. It may be that she had her losses; but we have a notion that they were few, and compensated on her peculiar principle, and, on the whole, she throve. At her outset in business she was dragged into a terrible dispute with the Misses Filkins, who at first dealt with her, and then basely slandered her souchong. The quarrel was deadly and fierce-nothing less than war to the knife-and in the end the Filkinses lost the day, and what was worse, lost their pupils, and had to take flight and settle somewhere else.

Mrs. Murgatroyd's example was by and by followed by

other enterprising spirits who are sure to spring up wherever there is a chance of doing business. A greengrocer was the next to make his appearance, and he combined a coalshed with his potatoes and cabbages, dispensing at once the viands and the materials for cooking them. Then came a carpenter and joiner; then a vender of sweet-stuffs, who, defiant of Mrs. Murgatroyd, dared to sell peg-tops, marbles, paper-kites, and hoops for the boys; then a cooper, and then a slopseller. In short, in less than a couple of years from the erection of the tall chimney, the whole street on both sides of the way, with the exception of a very few houses, was transformed into a third-rate business street, and had lost all trace of its original neatness. As every man had constructed his shop on his own plan, and the last-comers had vied with each other in encroaching as far as possible on the footpath, the ranks of shops showed a beautiful irregularity in their fronts, and imparted to the straight street a tortuous aspect which it retains to the present hour. The tall chimney above referred to belongs to a saw-mill, which has prospered from the hour when it first took up its position in the neighbourhood, and which has not only increased its own establishment to three times its original extent, but has gathered round it a host of industrial professors, all more or less dependent upon the services of a saw-mill for the prosecution of their labour. These hosts have invaded Strawberry Street, and have taken possession of its every floor, to the final dispersion of the votaries of gentility, who have abandoned it in despair.

If you go into Strawberry Street now and look for No. 10, where once, beneath an arch of red damask curtains, Miss Montgomery's famous campanula drew admiring glances from the passers-by, you will find that rigid maiden's parlour, once an impenetrable sanctum to everything masculine, save the pale-faced page and his breast of golden buttons, transformed into a barber's shop. The pole, with its bunchy top,

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sticks diagonally at the side of the doorway, like a monster rocket ready to be fired over the opposite houses; and within, where once not so much as a thought of a beard was suffered to intrude, beards are now seen to wag with equivocal jokes, and are dealt with by the gross whenever Saturday-night comes round. No. 9, to the right of barber Suddles, has long since been turned into a beer-shop, and is celebrated far and wide for the flavour of its treble X, at 3d. a pot in your own jugs," and which may be drunk on the premises at 4d. It mounts, as a sign, the Circular Saw, and is already a powerful rival to the Fox and Salutation; and when the landlord has obtained his spirit-licence, for which he has applied three times already, and makes sure of getting it when the magistrates meet again, Strawberry Street will be blessed with a gin-shop-that modern climax of civilisation. A little lower down, on the other side of the way, stands Punter's coffee-shop, known as the early breakfast-house. Punter's is open at five o'clock in the morning all the year through, and hot coffee and thick slices are to be had at any time between that hour and twelve at midnight. Punter never gets above four hours' sleep in his bed; but he makes up for that deficiency, in good part, by a two hours' stretch on the bench in the afternoon, and such other occasional winks as he can catch, with the connivance of Mrs. Punter, during the day. The purlieus of Strawberry Street are now alive with work-shops and work-yards, from which, whenever there is an interval from labour, there is an influx of labourers and apprentices into Punter's. The attractions of the place are not very great, consisting, besides the coffee and slices, of a couple of weekly papers, an occasional second-hand copy of the Times cut up into single leaves for distribution, a few cheap illustrated serials, and unlimited dominoes. When the evenings are wet and muddy, Punter's place is crammed, not so much from the force of its attractions, as from the necessity his customers

are under of going somewhere, and the fact that they have nowhere else to go save to the public-house or to bed.

Thirty years, which are nothing in the life of some streets, have changed Strawberry Street from the abode of quiet and ease-loving competence to that of the toiling and struggling mass, and within the period of an average lifetime hurried it through all those changes which generally require centuries for their operation. In its present condition-its grass and trees all gone, for the former has been trodden out, and the latter cut down for firewood by the inhabitants with its footways choked with shavings, stale cabbage-leaves, empty pewter-pots, coal-sacks, barrels of sodden cranberries, and tubs of red herrings-with its roadway half blocked up with trucks, barrows, and hand-carts, and worn into ruts by waggon-wheels-with its upper windows bristling with drying-poles adorned with the dangling shapes of female costume-with its wide open doors left eternally gaping for the convenience of unnumbered lodgers, and revealing the stained and tattered walls of the interiors, and flights of dusty stairs; in its present condition, we say, we fail to recognise a single feature of the Strawberry Street of old; and it is a fact that on searching for it lately, after the lapse of many years, we walked twice through its whole length without recognising our quondam suburban retreat. If, however, the subject of our remarks has lost in the article of respectability-a word, by the way, which is much misapplied—it has gained immensely in usefulness and populousness. For every head it sheltered in its genteel infancy, when it glittered in all the glory of paint and polish, it now accommodates ten at the least; and if in its youthful days it could boast of spending a deal of money, it may now solace itself with the reflection that it earns a still greater amount. Its dense population are all doers and workers, with hardly a single exception; and it stands noted in the registrar's report that they add to the aggregate of the