driving up in broughams from St. John’s Wood or Chelsea or Belgravia, with their gallants, or “protectors,” to the well-known rendezvous, at a late hour, to leave a little later for the various oyster-rooms in the district, through a dense crowd of lookers-on, drunk or sober, poor or rich, old or young, as the case might be. In no other capital in Europe was such a sight to be seen. The lesson taught by such a spectacle was neither moral nor improving at first sight, and it was not well that a young, giddy girl, with good looks, and wishing, above all things, for fine dresses and gay society—sick at heart of her lowly home and the dreary drudgery of daily poverty—should there practically have learnt that if she could but make up her mind to give her virtue to the winds, there awaited her the companionship of men of birth and breeding and wealth, and the gaudy, if short-lived, pomps and splendours of successful vice. It is true that in the outside crowd there were, in rags and tatters, in degradation and filth, shivering with cold, pale with want, hideous with intemperance and disease, homeless and friendless and destitute, withered hags old before their time, whom the policeman shrank from touching as he bade them move on, who once were the admired of the Argyle, and the pets and _protégées_ of England’s gilded youth; and here and there in the crowd, with boots in holes and broken hat, and needy coat buttoned as far as possible to the chin to conceal the absence of a shirt, with hands thrust in empty pockets, sodden in face and feeble of limb, were men who had been hauled from the Argyle to Bow Street and the gaol. It is true thus side by side were the bane and the antidote; but when did youth, flushed with wine and pleasure, pause on the road to ruin? Young says: All men think all men mortal but themselves,