Various

“ Time was, it is said, when the profession of a street-sweeper in London was a certain road to competence and fortune—when the men of the brooms were men of capital; when they lived well, and died rich, and left legacies behind them to their regular patrons. These palmy days, at any rate, are past now. Let no man, or woman either, expect a legacy at this time of day from the receiver of his copper dole. The labour of the modern sweeper is nothing compared with his of half a century ago. ”

“ In the multitudinous drama of life, which on the wide theatre of the metropolis is ever enacting with so much intense earnestness, there is, and from the very nature of things there always must be, a numerous class of supernumeraries, who from time to time, by the force of varying circumstances, are pushed and hustled off the stage, and shuffled into the side-scenes, the drear and dusky background of the world's proscenium. ”

“ He crawls lazily about the public ways, and begs under the banner of his broom, which constitutes his protection against the police. He will collect alms at a crossing which he would not cleanse to save himself from starvation; or he will take up a position at one which a morning sweeper has deserted for the day, and glean the sorry remnants of another man's harvest. He is as insensible to shame as to the assaults of the weather ”

“ When Goggs has a carpet to beat—he beats all the carpets on his estate—Mrs Goggs comes to console the post in his absence. She usually signalises her advent by a desperate assault with the broom upon the whole length of the crossing: it is plain she never thinks that Goggs keeps the place clean enough, and so she brushes him a hint. Goggs has a weakness for beer, and more than once we have seen him asleep on a hot thirsty afternoon, too palpably under the influence of John Barleycorn to admit of a doubt, his broom between his legs, and his back against his abstinent friend the post. ”

“ Paul Worthington and little Bessie did not like their history to be discussed by the rising frivolous generation; it was so unworldly, so sacred, and they looked forward with humble hope so soon to be united for ever in the better land, that it pained and distressed them to be made a topic of conversation.
Were we relating fiction, it would be easy to bring this antiquated pair together, even at the eleventh hour; love and constancy making up for the absence of one sweet ingredient, evanescent, yet beautiful—the ingredient we mean of youth. ”

“ Independent, too, of the unbroken stream of carriages which renders sweeping during the day impossible, and the collection of small coin from the crowd who dart impatiently across the road when a practicable breach presents itself, equally so, it is found that too dense a population is less favourable to the brotherhood of the broom than one ever so sparse and thin. ”

“ Though a large proportion of these agents of the world's traffic are daily borne to and from their destination in omnibuses, still the great majority, either for the sake of exercise or economy, are foot-passengers. For the accommodation of the latter, the crossing-sweeper stations himself upon the dirtiest portion of the route, and clearing a broad and convenient path ere the sun is out of bed, awaits the inevitable tide, which must flow, and which can hardly fail of bringing him some remuneration for his labour. ”

“ Another superstition of the country, originating no doubt in local circumstances, found its way into Europe, where no such circumstances existed. In India, a man suddenly vanishes. His family, perhaps, are expecting him at home, but from that moment he is never more heard of. He has been destroyed in the jungle by a tiger, and his remains so completely devoured by other animals, that there is scarcely a relic of his body left to give assurance of a man, far less as a proof of his identity. ”

“ Girls will not marry into a family without a witch, for how could their infants be protected from the spells of the other old women? It is dangerous to jostle an old woman on the street, however accidentally, lest she take vengeance on the spot. A man came into this unpleasant contact while he was walking along, carelessly chewing a piece of sugar-cane; and hearing the muttered objurgations of the hag, as he turned round to apologise, he was not surprised to find the juice of the cane turned into blood. ”

“ The channel of viscous mud, a foot deep, through which, so late as the time when George the Third was king, the carts and carriages had literally to plough their way, no longer exists, and the labour of the sweeper is reduced to a tithe of what it was. He has no longer to dig a trench in the morning, and wall up the sides of his fosse with stiff earth, hoarded for the purpose, as we have seen him doing in the days when 'Boney' was a terror. ”

“ Where light air is circulated instead of heavy blood, great vascularity serves only to make existence more ethereal. Plethora probably takes the insect nearer to the skies, instead of dragging it towards the dust. The hawk-moth, with its burly body, may often be seen hovering gracefully, on quivering wings, over some favourite flower, as if it were hung there on cords, while it rifles it of its store of accumulated sweets by means of its long unfolded tongue. The common house-fly makes 600 strokes every second in its ordinary flight, and gets through five feet of space by means of them ”

“ The dragon-fly often remains on the wing in pursuit of its prey for hours at a stretch, and yet will sometimes baffle the swallow by its speed, although that bird is calculated to be able to move at the rate of a mile in a minute. But the dexterity of this insect is even more surprising than its swiftness, for it is able to do what no bird can: it is able to stop instantaneously in the midst of its most rapid course, and change the direction of its flight, going sideways or backwards, without altering the position of its body. ”

“ He will only just take no notice, and continue to live on as if there was not a sorcerer in the world. But that smoke: it meets his eye the first object every morning. That ruddy glare: it is the last thing he sees at night. ”

“ It may be conceived, therefore, that a forest peopled with myriads upon myriads of such 'executants,' must have a strain for every ear, every mood, and every conscience.
The tree which welled forth milk when struck by the axe was the Ficus elastica—a sort of gigantic vine, as thick as a man's arm, which creeps along the ground, sending forth new roots from the joint, and, climbing at length some lofty tree, expands in branches. This is the chief caoutchouc-plant, and its sap has not only the colour, but many of the chemical properties of animal milk, and is frequently drunk as food. ”

“ He knows every inmate of every house in his immediate neighbourhood; and not only that, but he knows their private history and antecedents for the last twenty years. He has watched a whole generation growing up under his broom, and he looks upon them all as so much material destined to enhance the value of his estate. ”

“ Who will longer wonder, then, that the insect is so light? It is aerial in its inner nature. Its arterial system is filled with the ethereal atmosphere, as the more stolid creature's is with heavy blood.
If the reader has ever closely watched a large fly or bee, he will have noticed that it has none of the respiratory movements that are so familiar to him in the bodies of quadrupeds and birds. There is none of that heaving of the chest, and out-and-in movement of the sides, which constitute the visible phenomena of breathing. ”

“ The wing of the May-fly flapping in the air is a respiratory organ, of as much importance to the wellbeing of the creature in its way, as the gill-plate of its grub prototype is when vibrating under the water. But the wing of the insect is not the only respiratory organ: its entire body is one vast respiratory system, of which the wings are offsets. The spirally-lined air-vessels run everywhere, and branch out everywhere. The insect, in fact, circulates air instead of blood. ”

“ In traversing the same route in the middle of the day, not three of the sweepers would be found at their post; and the reason would be obvious enough, since the streets are then comparatively deserted, being populous in the morning only, because they are so many short-cuts or direct thoroughfares from the suburbs to the city. The morning sweeper is generally a lively and active young fellow; often a mere child, who is versed in the ways of London life, and who, knowing well the value of money from the frequent want of it, is anxious to earn a penny by any honest means. ”

“ The mechanical act of respiration merely serves to change the air contained within the air-receptacles. In the insects, this entire process is reversed; the air is carried by branching tubes to receptacles of blood scattered throughout the body; the blood-channels terminate in blood-extremities, and a capillary net-work of air-vessels is spread over these. Now, in the vertebrated creature, the chest is merely the grand air-receptacle into which the blood is sent to be aërated; while in the insect, the chest contains but its own proportional share of the great air-system. ”

“ As a general rule, insect wings that are intended for employment in flight are transparent membranes, with the course of the air-tubes marked out upon them as opaque nervures. These air-tubes, it will be remembered, are lined by spires of dense cartilage; and hence it is that they become nervures so well adapted to act like tent-lines in keeping the expanded membranes stretched. In the dragon-flies, the nervures are minutely netted for the sake of increased strength; in the bees, the nervures are simply parallel. Most insects have two pairs of these transparent membraneous wings ”

“ She never saw the phantom without a head, which accounts for her being alive to this day; or even wanting a limb, although she has not been without her share of the trials of the world. It can easily be conceived, however, that certain conditions of the atmosphere may produce these phenomena, which are regarded by the Hindoo seer as sure tokens of death or disaster.
This superstition is not more unreasonable than the mistakes of our early travellers, who were accustomed to attribute a meaning to the phenomena of nature, of which more accurate knowledge has entirely stripped them. ”

“ It is the confidant of his hopes and his sorrows, and sometimes, too, his agent and cashier, for he has cut a small basin in the top of it, where a passing patron may deposit a coin if he choose, under the guardianship of the broom, which, while he is absent for a short half-hour discussing a red herring and a crust for his dinner, leans gracefully against his friend the post, and draws the attention of a generous public to that as the deputy-receiver of the exchequer. ”

“ But in the insect organisation, a still more surprising display of mechanical skill is made. A comparatively heavy body is not only carried rapidly and conveniently along the surface of the ground, it is also raised entirely up from it at pleasure, and transported through lengthened distances, while resting upon nothing but the thin transparent air. ”

“ The wings are not altered legs; they are superadded to the legs. The insect has its fore-legs as well as its wings. The legs all descend from the under surface of the thoracic piece, while the wings arise from its upper surface. As the wings are flapping above during flight, the unchanged legs are dangling below, in full complement. The wings are, therefore, independent and additional organs. They have no relation whatever to limbs, properly so called. But there are some other portions of the animal economy with which they do connect themselves, both by structure and function. ”

“ Of the thousands and tens of thousands thus rudely dealt with, he is surely not the worst who, wanting a better weapon, shoulders a birch-broom, and goes forth to make his own way in the world, by removing the moist impediments of filth and refuse from the way of his more fortunate fellows. ”

“ The poor, dying man, in his days of health, had contributed to the enjoyment of the affluent, and in turn been courted by them; but now, forgotten and despised, he bitterly reviled the heartless world, whose hollow meed of applause it had formerly been the sole aim of his existence to secure. ”

“ He is the humble pensioner of a dozen families: he wears the shoes of one, the stockings of another, the shirts of a third, the coats of a fourth, and so on; and he knows the taste of everybody's cookery, and the temper of everybody's cookmaid, quite as well as those who daily devour the one and scold the other. ”

“ Power of voluntary and independent motion and animal organisation are associated together, as inseparable and essentially connected ideas, by even the earliest experience in the economy and ways of nature.
The animal faculty of voluntary motion, in almost every case, confers upon the creature the ability to transfer its body from place to place. In some animals, the weight of the body is sustained by immersion in a fluid as dense as itself. ”

“ The older women, on the other hand, of whom there is a pretty stout staff scattered throughout the metropolis, are too much impressed with the importance of adhering constantly to one spot, capriciously to change their position. They would dread to lose a connection they have been many years in forming, and they will even cling to it after it has ceased to be a thoroughfare through the opening of a new route, unless they can discover the direction their patrons have taken. ”