to
record. And those who cannot pay for such a refuge? They sleep where
they find a place, in passages, arcades, in corners where the police and
the owners leave them undisturbed. A few individuals find their way to
the refuges which are managed, here and there, by private charity, others
sleep on the benches in the parks close under the windows of Queen
Victoria. Let us hear the London _Times_:

"It appears from the report of the proceedings at Marlborough Street
Police Court in our columns of yesterday, that there is an average
number of 50 human beings of all ages, who huddle together in the
parks every night, having no other shelter than what is supplied by
the trees and a few hollows of the embankment. Of these, the majority
are young girls who have been seduced from the country by the soldiers
and turned loose on the world in all the destitution of friendless
penury, and all the recklessness of early vice.

"This is truly horrible! Poor there must be everywhere. Indigence
will find its way and set up its hideous state in the heart of a great
and luxurious city. Amid the thousand narrow lanes and by-streets of
a populous metropolis there must always, we fear, be much
suffering--much that offends the eye--much that lurks unseen.

"But that within the precincts of wealth, gaiety, and fashion, nigh
the regal grandeur of St. James, close on the palatial splendour of
Bayswater, on the confines of the old and new aristocratic quarters,
in a district where the cautious refinement of modern design has
refrained from creating one single tenement for poverty; which seems,
as it were, dedicated to the exclusive enjoyment of wealth, that
_there_ want, and famine, and disease, and vice should stalk in all
their kindred horrors, consuming body by body, soul, by soul!

"It is indeed a monstrous state of things! Enjoyment the most
absolute, that bodily ease, intellectual excitement, or the more
innocent pleasures of sense can supply to man's craving, brought in
close contact with the most unmitigated misery! Wealth, from its
bright saloons, laughing--an insolently heedless laugh--at the unknown
wounds of want! Pleasure, cruelly but unconsciously mocking the pain
that moans below! All contrary things mocking one another--all
contrary, save the vice which tempts and the vice which is tempted!

"But let all men remember this--th