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other traits, moreover, by which I could always detect them;--a guarded
lowness of tone in conversation, and a more than ordinary extension of
the thumb in a direction at right angles with the fingers.--Very often,
in company with these sharpers, I observed an order of men somewhat
different in habits, but still birds of a kindred feather. They may be
defined as the gentlemen who live by their wits. They seem to prey
upon the public in two battalions--that of the dandies and that of the
military men. Of the first grade the leading features are long locks and
smiles; of the second frogged coats and frowns.
Descending in the scale of what is termed gentility, I found darker
and deeper themes for speculation. I saw Jew pedlars, with hawk eyes
flashing from countenances whose every other feature wore only an
expression of abject humility; sturdy professional street beggars
scowling upon mendicants of a better stamp, whom despair alone had
driven forth into the night for charity; feeble and ghastly invalids,
upon whom death had placed a sure hand, and who sidled and tottered
through the mob, looking every one beseechingly in the face, as if in
search of some chance consolation, some lost hope; modest young girls
returning from long and late labor to a cheerless home, and shrinking
more tearfully than indignantly from the glances of ruffians, whose
direct contact, even, could not be avoided; women of the town of all
kinds and of all ages--the unequivocal beauty in the prime of her
womanhood, putting one in mind of the statue in Lucian, with the surface
of Parian marble, and the interior filled with filth--the loathsome and
utterly lost leper in rags--the wrinkled, bejewelled and paint-begrimed
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