morning
without knowing where to procure a breakfast. God be with them!

But all the want, and all the sin produced by want, in London, it would
take all the volumes of the _Conversations-Lexicon_ to recount. The
streets--every street--is filled with it. Survey the thoroughfares at
night. If any modest person is occasionally shocked at the exhibitions
in Broadway, what would he say to Regent street, the Haymarket, the
Strand, Fleet street, Cheapside, or fifty other streets in London? I
have reckoned nearly three hundred unfortunate females, as they call
themselves, in the space of one mile, on one side of the street alone,
from Charing Cross to Temple Bar. These girls, as records testify, were
mostly starved into the life of their adoption. They will tell you, if
you converse with them in their serious moments--for they have
such--that but for the mad excitement drawn from gin, they could not
live. The river that flows sullenly along--what a catalogue of woes,
what shame and frenzied despair, it has ended!

I was crossing Waterloo Bridge one night when there was suddenly a shout
and a rush of people. A girl had thrown herself off the parapet, and was
struggling in the water. The moon shone brightly down, and her figure
was distinctly visible as she wrestled with the tide that was bearing
her away. She was the third that had jumped into the river within twelve
days; the average of such suicides in London being one in eight days. A
vain effort was made to save her. Her body drifted down the river to be
cast up at Greenwich or Woolwich, or perhaps the tide swept it out to
sea, never to be found. I searched the newspapers for many days
afterward, but saw no record of the poor creature's miserable end. These
things happen so frequently in London, that the press seldom records
them, unless they offer some peculiar features of interest.

In treating of the horrid want and misery that prevail among the very
poorest class in London, I have as yet only partially uncovered the
picture. We will draw the curtain back a little further, not to present
the entire truth in all its fidelity, for that would be too harrowing.

In the streets of London I have seen women and children contending for
the possession of a bone drawn from the slush of the kennel. I have seen
boys fight and bruise each other for a crust of bread dropped upon the
pavement, and covered with wet mud, or even unsightlier filth. I have
entered the abode of this des