Forlorn men, women, and children, and a spacious township peopled with them, from cellars to attics--from the resort of the sewer-rat to the nest of the sparrow in the chimney-stack--make up that realm of suffering and crime which adventurous people visit with as much ceremony and provision of protection as belated travellers across Finchley Common used in the middle of last century.

You put yourself in communication with , to begin with. You adopt rough clothes. You select or companions who will not flinch even before the humors and horrors of Tiger Bay, and you commit yourself to the guidance of of the intelligent and fearless heads of the detective force. He mounts the box of the cab about o'clock, and the horse's head is turned-east.

When we move out of toward Smithfield, we leave familiar London in a few minutes, and reach the lanes and by-ways, dark and noisy, and swarming with poor, that come under the merciful guardianship of good Mr. Catlin's Cow

Cross mission. The progress of the cab becomes slow and difficult; angry words are exchanged with the driver; groups of gossiping or quarrelling men and women block the road; the houses are black and grim, and only at the corners where the gin palaces light up their cruel splendors can we obtain glimpses of the inhabitants. They are kith and kin of those we have seen so often skulking about amid the cobblers' stalls and bird-fanciers of , Dials, ranging themselves outside the gates of casual wards, or begging their way into a

nearer the smoke.

We halt at the opening of a yard, alight, and in a few minutes are in a crowd of tattered and tired-out creatures, who are being filtered into a refuge.

Surely there can be only good in this minimum of relief, offered by spontaneous charity to the houseless, in a whole cityful of poor! They pass in by : the father and his foot-sore boy; the mother with her whimpering babe in her arms, that are so lean they must hurt the flesh of the little imp. The superintendent is a mild, but firm, intelligent, and discerning man. He distributes the regulation lump of bread to the guests, and they pass on, by way of the bath-rigorously enforced for obvious reasons to the dormitories set out like barracks, and warmed with a stove, which is always the centre of attraction. Here, when all are in bed, a Bible-reader reads, comforting, let us hope, many of the aching heads. The women and children have a ward apart. Some are reading, some are sewing rents in their clothes, some are darning, some have cast themselves to rest under the leather coverings, and, with inexpressible weariness, are in the land of dreams. I have paced these dormitories early and late, and have been with strong men who have burst into tears as their eyes have fallen upon the rows of sleeping mothers, some with , some with infants huddled to their sides for warmth, or folded in their poor arms. Young and old are here-houseless, and with babes to carry forth to-morrow into the east wind and sleet. This story is told by the coughs that crackle like a distant running fire of musketry all

It is a pity that there is not connected with every refuge for the houseless a well-ordered practical labor agency; for every night deserving and willing men, women, and boys pass in who would rejoice to be shifted from the streets; but, alas! our organizers of charity are only making confusion worse confounded.

From the Refuge by Smithfield we rattled through dark lanes, across horrid, flashing highways, to the Whitechapel Police Station, to pick up the superintendent of savage London. He had some poor, wan specimens-maundering drunk--in his cells already, and it was hardly o'clock. We dismiss our cab; it would be useless in the strange, dark by-ways to which we are bound; by-ways, the natives of which will look upon us as the Japanese looked upon the European travellers in the streets of Yeddo. The missionary, the parish doctor, the rent collector (who must be a bold man indeed), the policeman, the detective, and the humble undertaker are the human beings from without our Alsatia who enter appearances in this weird and horrible Bluegate Fields, where, in the open doorways, low-browed ruffians and women who emphasize even their endearments with an oath scowl at us in threatening groups as we

Stick close together, gentlemen; this is a very rough part,

We plunge into a maze of courts and narrow streets of low houses --nearly all the doors of which are open, showing kitchen fires blazing far in the interior, and strange figures moving about. Whistles, shouts, oaths, growls, and the brazen laughter of tipsy women; sullen

goodnights

Good-night, Ben,

We advance into a low, long, dark room parted into boxes, in which are packed the most rascally company any great city could show. They stare, leer, dig each other in the ribs, fold their black hands over the cards, and grunt and growl as the superintendent reviews them with a firm and placid look of command. The place is clean, compared with the guests, thanks to the Common Lodging-house Act; but it is charged with the unmistakable, overpowering damp and mouldy odor that is in every thieves' kitchen, in every common lodging-house, every ragged

He would be stripped to his shirt,

We turned into of the lowest of low lodging-houses for a direction. It was a small kitchen, with or hideous old hags in it, and a child begrimed with dirt rolling upon the hearth. A bull'seye was turned upon the landlady: she was shamefaced, and tried to hide her bruised arms and cheeks.

Ah, locked up last night, I remember,

Very

drunk.

in quod for a month-begging.

Edwin Drood

We escaped from the opium fumes, in which a score of white mice (the woman's pets) were gambolling over the rags and dirt she called her bed; back through the tangle of courts, in of which we were told there was not an unconvicted lodger; under the fire of invective and sarcasm from women who threw up the windows and gesticulated at us like fiends, to a certain thieves' public-house, the landlord of which is of the most considerable receivers of stolen goods in the country. Our sergeant and superintendent hoped we should not mind if a little scuffle ensued: they had a slight job--a trifling capture--somebody whom they wanted--in their eye. It would be over in a few minutes. I and of our party[*]  entered a crowded public-house — thieves, to a boy — and pushed through to a door at the back, where a young, hard-featured woman was stationed, taking money. We passed into a large room, in the corner of which was a raised piano and a little platform. The entire audience turned towards us faces the combined effect of which I shall never forget. The music stopped, and amid a general flutter our sergeant, backed by the superintendent, passed the awful array of criminal

Not there,

It would have been a tough job.

Indeed, demands for gin assailed us on all sides. Women old and young, girls and boys in the most woful tatters, rogues of all descriptions, brazen-faced lads dancing in the flaring ball-rooms on the floor of the public-houses, even the Fire King who was performing before half a dozen sailors, and the pot-boy who showed the way up the steep stairs, wanted gin-nothing but gin. Some cried for a pint, others for half a pint, others for a glass; not so much because they had any hope that their prayer would be granted, as humoring a savage, rebellious spirit that stirred in them to mock at us for lamenting their woe-begone condition. Rebuked by the police, who did their spiriting very gently always, they would fall back, and grimace at us, and imitate our manners, our voice, our movements.

We were to them as strange and amusing as Chinamen; and we were something more and worse. We were spies upon them; men of better luck whom they were bound to envy, and whose mere presence roused the *

It was in the morning when we got clear of the East.

[*] Prince Charles Bonaparte, who, as a thoughtful and serious observer, made the tour of the East End one night (February 5, 1872) with me, accompanied by the Marquis of Bassano, and Monsieur Filon, tutor to the Prince Imperial.