Then, there is something so genteel about that mail-coach; and the passengers outside (who are all hat) give it such an air of reality! The goods here are adapted to the taste, or rather to the means, of cheap purchasers.

There are some of the most beautiful _looking_ Pembroke tables that were ever beheld: the wood as green as the trees in the Park, and the leaves almost as certain to fall off in the course of a year.
There is also a most extensive assortment of tent and turn-up bedsteads, made of stained wood, and innumerable specimens of that base imposition on society--a sofa bedstead.
A turn-up bedstead is a blunt, honest piece of furniture; it may be slightly disguised with a sham drawer; and sometimes a mad attempt is even made to pass it off for a book-case; ornament it as you will, however, the turn-up bedstead seems to defy disguise, and to insist on having it distinctly understood that he is a turn-up bedstead, and nothing else--that he is indispensably necessary, and that being so useful, he disdains to be ornamental.
How different is the demeanour of a sofa bedstead! Ashamed of its real use, it strives to appear an article of luxury and gentility--an attempt in which it miserably fails.

It has neither the respectability of a sofa, nor the virtues of a bed; every man who keeps a sofa bedstead in his house, becomes a party to a wilful and designing fraud--we question whether you could insult him more, than by insinuating that you entertain the least suspicion of its real use.
To return from this digression, we beg to say, that neither of these classes of brokers' shops, forms the subject of this sketch.

The shops to which we advert, are immeasurably inferior to those on whose outward appearance we have slightly touched.

Our readers must often have observed in some by-street, in a poor neighbourhood, a small dirty shop, exposing for sale the most extraordinary and confused jumble of old, worn-out, wretched articles, that can well be imagined.