all Palestine; and, I fear, more rogues than there are even in America. On a Sunday you will hear Welsh in one church, Dutch in another, the ancient dialect of St. Chrysostom in another; and on a Saturday you may plunge into low dancing-houses at the East-End which put to shame anything of the kind in Hamburg or Antwerp or Rotterdam. In many of the smoking-rooms bordering on Mark Lane and Cheapside you hear nothing but German. I know streets and squares inhabited by Dutch and German Jews, or dark-eyed Italians, or excitable Frenchmen, where The tongue that Shakespeare spake is as little understood as Sanscrit itself. At any moment I like I can rush away from all European civilisation, and sit in a little room and smoke opium with the heathen Chinee—whose smile all the while is “childlike and bland”—as if I were thousands of miles away. On the other side of St. Paul’s I have supped with hundreds of thieves at a time, who carry on their work as if there was no such institution as that of the police; I have listened to the story of the crowded lodgers, and I can believe anything you like to tell me of the wealth, of the poverty, of the virtue, of the vice of London. People say the metropolis has seven thousand miles of streets. I have no doubt it has. People say it has on Sunday sixty miles of shops open, and they may be right; at least I have neither the time nor the inclination to test these figures. It also rejoices, I hear, in as many public-houses as, if set in a line, would reach from Charing Cross to Portsmouth. The people of London read or write in the course of a year as many as two hundred and forty millions of letters. All these letters are written, all these public-houses supported, all these streets lined with houses inhabited by men who more or less are connected with the city. It is there they live, if they sleep fifty miles away, and it is a hard life some of them have assuredly. A little while ago a poor woman was charged with pawning shirts entrusted to her to make by an East-End merchant clothier. The woman pleaded that her children were so hungry that she was tempted to pawn some of the work in the hope of being able to redeem it by the time the whole was completed. The work was machine-sewing. She hired the machine at half-a-crown a week, and was paid by the prosecutor a shilling a dozen for his shirts. “Nonsense,” said the magistrate; “that is only a penny each.” “And that is all it is, sir,” said the poor woman. “And you have to work a long day to make twelve. And is it really a fact,” said the magistrate, turning to the merchant clothier, “that this kind of work has fallen into such a deplorable condition that you can get it done at so poor a rate?” “Your worship,” was the reply, “if I wanted a hundred hands at the price I could get ’em by holding up my finger.”