From the time when William Hogarth painted his picture of the Calais Gate till only a short time ago, when refugees fled from besieged Paris to find some poor and wretched lodging in the purlieus of Cranbourne Street, where they might live in peace and hear their native tongue, this has been the resort of poor foreigners in London. It almost reminds one of some of the smaller streets of a continental city; and as we look at the queer shabby restaurants, and the shops with strange names painted above them in long yellow letters, we almost expect to find the pavement change to cobble-stones, and to see some queer wooden sign dangle overhead, so like is the place to the small bourgeois quarter that in our earlier days lay behind the Madeleine and the Porte St. Denis. For here is an actual crêmerie—a queer compound of {213} cook-shop and milkseller's—with a couple of bright dairy cans outside the door, and a long loaf or two amidst the cups and plates and sausages in the dingy window. Over the way you see "Blanchisseuse" in large letters; and next door is a laiterie, which differs from a crêmerie as a café alone differs from a café restaurant with its "commerce de vins" painted in big capitals in front of a long row of sour-looking bottles and a green calico curtain. It is a quaint jumble, all the way to Dean Street, and till we reach the edge of the Haymarket—a jumble of Brown and Lebrun, of Jones and Jean, of Robin (fils) and Robinson; but for all the little musty-smelling cafés, the blank bare-windowed restaurants, the crêmeries, and the boulangeries, there is nothing of a well fed look about the district, especially just at this corner, leading as it seems to a stable-yard or the entrance to a range of packers' warehouses. There is one open front here—is it a farrier's or a blacksmith's shop?—where they appear to be doing a stroke of business, however, for there is a clinking, and a fire, and a steam; but the steam has a fragrant odour of vegetables—of celery and turnips, of haricots and gravy—the clink is that of basins and spoons getting ready, and the fire is that of the boiler which simmers two mighty cauldrons. Step to the front, and you will see in big white letters right across the house, "Mont St. Bernard Hospice." You may well rub your eyes, for you are in the heart of London, and stand in Ham Yard, Leicester Square, before the soup-kitchen that is open all the year.