Darkness and danger ruled the roads at night with all the horrors of the Rome of Juvenal. Oil lamps flickered freely in some of the better streets, but even these were not lit so long as any suggestion of twilight served for {72} an excuse to delay the illumination. When the moon shone they were not lit at all. Link-boys drove a busy trade in lighting belated wanderers to their homes, and saving them from the perils of places where the pavement was taken up or where open sewers yawned. Precaution was needful, for pitfalls of the kind were not always marked by warning lanterns. Footpads roamed about, and worse than footpads. The fear of the Mohocks had not yet faded from civic memories, and there were still wild young men enough to rush through the streets, wrenching off knockers, insulting quiet people, and defying the watch. Indeed the watch were, as a rule, as unwilling to interfere with dangerous revellers as were the billmen of Messina, and seem to have been little better than thieves or Mohocks themselves. They are freely accused of being ever ready to levy black-mail upon those who walked abroad at night by raising ingenious accusations of insobriety and insisting upon being bought off, or conveying their victim to the round-house. [Sidenote: 1714--Clubs] The Fleet Ditch, which is almost as much of a myth to our generation as the stream of black Cocytus itself, was an unsavory reality still in the London which George the First entered. It was a tributary of the Thames, which, rising somewhere among the gentle hills of Hampstead, sought out the river and found it at Blackfriars. At one time it was used for the conveyance of coals into the city, and colliers of moderate size used to ascend it for a short distance. But towards the end of Anne's reign, and indeed for long before, it had become a mere trickling puddle, discharging its filth and refuse and sewage into the river, and poisoning the air around it.