him across the country; their way led them through a turnpike-gate, and, to my friend’s horror, the driver never once pulled up to allow him to pay the toll. My friend expostulated; as the toll had to be paid, he thought the better plan was to pay it at once. “Oh, it’s all right,” said Jehu, smiling, “they know me well enough—I am the man wot drives the prisoners, and prisoners never pay.” Our London cabby is often similarly employed, and, as he rushes by, we may well speculate as to the nature and mission of his fare. Cabby so often drives rogues that we cannot wonder if in time he becomes a bit of a rogue himself. CHAPTER XIX. FREE DRINKING FOUNTAINS. Till lately the London poor had no means of getting water but the pump or the public-house. Of the latter we can have but a poor opinion, nor all the former much better. It appears that “the London pumps can never be otherwise than dangerous sources of supply; the porous sod from which they suck being that into which our cesspools and leaky drains discharge a great part of their fluid—sometimes even a great part of their solid contents, and in which, till very recently, all our interments have taken place. It is a soil which consequently abounds with putrid and putrefiable matter. The water derived from it invariably contains products of organic decomposition, more or less oxidised; and it is a mere chance, beyond the power of water-drinkers to measure or control, whether that oxidation shall at all times be so incomplete as to have left the water still capable of a very dangerous kind of fermentation.” We are further told that, “the shallow well water receives the drainage of Highgate Cemetery, of numerous burial grounds, and of innumerable cesspools which percolate the soil on the London side of the Cemetery, and flow towards the Metropolis. . . . That the pump-water also becomes contaminated with the residual liquors of manufacturing processes. . . . That a man who habitually makes use of London pump-water, lives in perpetual danger of disease.” But one of the greatest and most unexpected sources of danger is, that the sense of taste or smell fails to warn us of the danger of using such water, since clearness, coolness, and tastelessness, may exist, without being evidences of wholesomeness. We are also told that “the carbonic acid of the decomposed matter makes them sparkling, and the nitrates they contain give them a pleasant coolness to the taste, so that nothing could be better adapted to lure their victims to destruction than the external qualities of these waters—hence the worst of them are most popular for drinking purposes.”