L120 per week, or L6,240 annually from forty-one houses, if they are
regularly occupied. Truly furnished apartments specially provided for
the submerged are extra specially adapted to the purpose of keeping them
submerged.

As no deputy disputes our entrance, we enter and proceed to gain
some knowledge of the tenants, and take some stock of their rooms and
furniture.

The rooms are simply but by no means sweetly furnished! Here is an
inventory and a mental picture of one room. A commodious bed with dirty
appointments that makes us shudder! A dirty table on which are some
odds and ends of unclean crockery, a couple of cheap Windsor chairs, a
forbidding-looking chest of drawers, a rusty frying-pan, a tin kettle,
a teapot and a common quart jug. He would be a bold man that bid ten
shillings for the lot, unless he bought them as a going concern. A cheap
and nasty paper covers the wall, excepting where pieces have been torn
away, and the broken walls are made of lath and plaster, to provide
splendid cover for innumerable insects which remain in undisputed
possession.

One floor much resembles another, but the basement and the top storey
rooms are the worst of all. We look through the window of a second floor
back room, and see the out premises, but one look is sufficient.

We want to know something of the tenants, so we enter into conversation
with them, and find them by no means reserved.

Room 1. Husband and wife about thirty-five years of age, no children;
husband has been ill for some months, during which the rent got behind.
When he was taken to the infirmary they lost their home altogether; she
did washing and charing for a time, but ultimately got into the "House."

When her husband got better, and was discharged from the infirmary, his
old mates collected ten shillings for him, he took the room in which
they now lived, and of course she joined him.

How did they live? Well, it was hardly living; her husband looked round
every day and managed to "pick up something," and she got a day or
two days' work every week--their rent was always paid in advance. What
happened when her husband did not "pick up something" she did not say,
but semi-starvation seemed the only alternative.

No. 2. Husband, wife and a girl of seven engaged in making coarse paper
flowers of lurid hue. They had been in that room for six months; they
sold the paper flowers in the streets, but being summer time they did
not sell many. At Christm