In many cases the end of all this is wretchedness at home and loss of character and means of subsistence; if he is in a house of business he lives beyond his income, and embezzlement is the result. If he be in business on his own account his end is bankruptcy, at any rate his health is not benefited by his indulgence at the bar, and to most men who have to earn their daily bread loss of health is loss of employment and poverty, more or less enduring and grinding and complete. What the gin-shop is to the working man, the restaurant and the refreshment bar are to the middle classes of society. There is no disgrace in dropping in there, and so the young man learns to become a sot. Planted as they are at all the railway termini, they are an ever-present danger; they are fitted up in a costly style, and the young ladies are expected to be as amiable and good-looking as possible, and thus when a young man has a few minutes to spare at a railway terminus, naturally he makes his way to the refreshment bar. Dartmoor was full, writes the author of “Convict Life,” with the men whom drink had led into crime—from the mean wretch who pawned his wife’s boots for ninepence, which he spent in the gin-shop, to the young man from the City who became enamoured “with one of the painted and powdered decoy-ducks who are on exhibition at the premises of a notorious publican within a mile of Regent Circus.” At first he spent a shilling or two nightly; but he quickly found that the road to favour was at bottle of Moët, of which his _inamorata_ and her painted sisters partook very freely. The acquaintance soon ripened under the influence of champagne till he robbed his employer, and was sent to Dartmoor. “He told me himself,” writes our author, “that from the time he first went to that tavern he never went to bed perfectly sober, and that all his follies were committed under the influence of champagne.” Another case he mentions was even worse. At the time of his conviction the young man of whom he writes was on the eve of passing an examination for one of the learned professions; but be had been an _habitué_ of the buffet of let us call it the Royal Grill Room Theatre and a lounger at the stage door of that celebrated establishment, and had made the acquaintance of one of the ladies of the ballet. Under the influence of champagne he also soon came to grief. “In the name of God,” says the writer to young men in London, “turn up taverns.”