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526  open at home at all hours of all seasons:—just an inch or two at top, if no more, as is done at all our hospitals for chest diseases. They should go out warm and well fed; but neither in a perspiration nor a fever, from too much fire and meat and drink. Thus prepared, and in dry and sufficient clothes, they have only to keep their blood flowing with exercise, to be able to defy wind and weather in any season. This is what policemen should do: but they seem not to understand it: for, of these picked young men, so sound in health at so late a date, eighty-nine died in the Metropolitan police in five years from disease of the lungs.

After a time John will have had his turn in the second relay of the day service, going out at 10, and returning at 2 : and being on his beat again from 6 till 10 in the evening. If he is like most of his comrades, he will find neither so agreeable as he expected; and he will be glad to try night-duty,—little as he could once have supposed that he should desire to be on foot for eight hours of every night for months together. But the quiet is a very great thing; and the duty is generally easy. To try the fastenings of shops and dwellings; to see the last carriages drive away from balls and theatres; to look to the proper closing of public-houses; to watch suspicious loiterers, and examine doubtful-looking bundles carried furtively; to keep mischievous people moving on, and take the destitute to some place of shelter; to be on the look out for the sight or smell of fire or smoke, and quick to hear the springing of a rattle in any direction; to keep order at the starting of the earliest railway trains, and at the entrance of the country waggons, bringing vegetables, fish, meat, and flowers to market;—all this is easy in comparison with the day-work, from the more comparative emptiness of the streets and absence of noise.

Still, there will be another change for John. He will marry. He ought to marry; for he can very well afford it; he should have the comfort of a home of his own; and he will be a more valuable member of the force for being a family man. He ought, after that, to rise. His mother may see him a sergeant: perhaps, in course of years, an inspector. She does not see why not.

Others do see why not:—that few men remain in the force many years. They see their comrades, fine young men like themselves, carried to the grave,—not in greater numbers per thousand perhaps than many in other occupations, but more than there should be of so select a class. Six or seven in the thousand each year is a high rate of death. Then, out of the thousand admitted each year, as many as 35 are invalided, above 40 more are dismissed, and above 130 resign from one cause or another. From one cause or another, nearly a quarter of the new men have left by the end of the first year; and, as we saw before, the average length of service is only four years.

It is therefore probable that John’s vocation will not always be that of policeman. His having been one, especially if he leaves the force from his own free choice, will assist his settlement in some favourable post where the virtues of the constable, with a dash of the quality of the soldier, are prized and paid for. In future years, when his old mother is sitting on one side of his household fire, and his boys are home from school and work for the evening, and John is supping before going to his post as watchman at the bank, or night-porter at one of the great hotels, he will bring out another of the thousand-and-one curious and romantic stories which all begin in the same way:—“When I was a policeman.” Perhaps his old mother may sigh, and say there was a time when it was the first wish of his heart to be a policeman; and if he had kept to it, he would now have been very near receiving his pension for life: upon which, his wife may probably observe that there is another side to the case; and if he had not left the force before his health was lost, he might have been in his grave years ago, or a tottering invalid, on whom his epitaph would have been fixed while he was only half-dead:—“He was a good policeman.” .

Number Blank, Baker Street—I would not for worlds disclose the number lest I might carry desolation into the breasts of a most respectable family—there was a dinner-party one day last week. Nor will I tell you the precise day, because, starting from that as an ascertained point, you might by a series of jesuitical inquiries prosecuted at the establishment of Capillaire and Sweetbread, pastrycooks and confectioners, ascertain where that banquet was held, and so all my precautions to insure the repose of the family in question would be entirely frustrated, and of no effect.

The Bakers of Baker Street—I say—were minded to give a dinner-party. They gave four every season, and by these four instalments of hospitality duly paid up, discharged their obligations in this kind to the human race in general, and to their friends and acquaintances in particular.

The Bakers pre-eminently constituted a type of English respectability. Mr. John Baker, of Baker Street—the second son of Mr. John Baker, also at Baker Street, but long since deceased—had been twice married. In the first instance he had intermarried with the Welbecks. By Miss Jane Welbeck, his first wife, he had issue now surviving: Margaret, married to Mr. Thomas Stubbs, solicitor, of Shrewsbury, in the county of Salop; John, now doing a very fair commission business in the city of London; Matthew, a surveyor, established at Newcastle-under-Lyne, Staffordshire; and Sophia, yet a spinster. By his second marriage with Mrs. Wimpole, the relict of Mr. Thomas Wimpole, late of Wimpole Street, he had issue four daughters: Martha, married to Mr. Tucker Eaton, junior partner in the firm of “Swill and Eaton,” wine-merchants, of Abchurch Lane—private residence at Stamford Hill; Mary Jane, married to Mr. Frederick Snowball, notary and conveyancer, of Tokenhouse Yard, Lothbury; and Lucy and Anna Maria, who were as yet