Street Loafers

Wkeiice ao they come, those idlers in the streets who, wandering in single rank or dispersed dotachnients aniong the busy and the purposeful, are confounded with them, and never seen for ■what they are till eomething hippens w'oich calis them together, when they astonish us by their numbers and the problem of how they are able to live at all - idling uot being a profitable investment of one's capital. Men and women who, one would suopose, had enongh to do to keep thiugs "straight, and to ünd food and clothing for themselves and those belonging to them, if they worked diligently for twelve honrs out of the twenty-four, gather into compact nwsses of gaping idleness at every umisual oecurrcnce, every trifling accident, and pass honre staring at the sight, if hours are needed to be passcd before the obetruction gets itself removed, or the show vanishes into space. Masterless men, surely, they must be ; y et evidently they are not their own masíers, so far as having the whip-hand of circumstances goes - women without home or duties, for all that dress and appearanco and the betraying weddiug-ring wonld seem to point to both ; mero idlers cumbering the gronnd which others till, and living as best they can on food which they onty help to consume, king do trouble to créate or prepare. These multitudes of idlers to bo colleeted together in the streete of any large town at a moment's notice have always seemed to us to be the oddest phenomenon of our social Ufe. Men with the need and marks of work legibly wiittcn on every square inch of their person and attire, why are they not at their bench, in the factory, the foundry, the ship-yard, at tho nnvil. at the loom ! Or, if they belong to none of these Irades, aud are of that quefr, nondeRcript class which seems to have no settled occupatiou, and one may well believe no settled home - which calis it&elf genorioally tlieclassof the " handy mru," rc.idy for jobs of any kind and living on the disregarded crumbs of labor - how ia it that they give so much t me f rom their scratehings on the snrface of the great fit ld of work, and apend in street sight-seeing that pre cious jowel to iiumanity called time? Who can teil ? All we know is that, liko vulmreB gathnred to the carcasa, not the least event cftn happen in tho strects out of the ordinair run of daily traffic - a horse cannot f all, a new kind of hurdygurdy caunot grind out a familiar tune, a mountebaDk ctnaot go through tricks that were stalo a hundred years ago, nor Punch repeat a pantomimo known by hí art to all but the rising generation - but tlie idlers are gathered in crowds ; and for them, at least, all the duties of üfe are suspended for hours to come.