ut fourteen, and I find myself in the
midst of a group of youthful costermongers and their wives, who have come
here for a lark, just as they frequent the penny gaff, or crowd the
gallery in the Victoria. I listen to their slang till I feel sick, as I
think for what a future of crime and its result they are now rapidly
ripening. In this Christian land can no agency be formed that shall save
these young heathens? Again, I find a female standing by my side; she is
horridly dirty; she stinks of gin; her face is that of the confirmed
sot--of one who has given up home and husband, and comfort, and decency,
for the accursed drink. She looks very piteously in my face. "And so
they are going to hang the poor man," she exclaims; "they have no mercy
on him." "You forget," I reply, "the poor man whom he murdered, and on
whom he had no mercy." "No, I don't," she exclaims with tipsy gravity;
"he had no right to kill the man, and ought to be punished; but ain't we
all morally bad?"--but here the conversation ends, for she has sunk down,
maudlin, stinking with gin, and overcome by it and weariness, on the
doorstep. Ah, these doorsteps, let us look at them. To-night the police
don't bid the _habitues_ move on. What crowds are collected on
them,--ragged boys, who, perhaps, have nowhere else to sleep,
wild-looking women unbonnetted and shoeless, with red, uncombed hair,
faces very much marked with the small pox, only seen on such occasions as
these--old men crouch on them for whom home has no charm, and life no
lustre, and girls whose rouged cheeks and shabby finery tell to what
wretchedness and degradation, though young in years, they have already
come. Let them sleep on, if they can, on their stony mattress, beneath
this inclement sky, out in this cold December night; they are happier now
than they can be in their waking hours! But look at the windows, all
lighted up and filled with gay company. Those two beautiful girls--let
us hope they are not ladies--not English mothers or wives--who have just
stepped out of the brougham, and are now gazing from a first-floor on the
wild human sea beneath, will sit playing cards and drinking champagne all
night; yet scarce have the sounds of Sabbath bells died away, and in a
few hours a man is to be hung, and these girls, all sensibility and
tears, will sit with their opera glasses during the fearful agony, as if
merely Grisi acted or Mario sang.

Let us take another stroll through this