The road led us to the east side of the city, which we entered with the late market-carts. No words can describe the congestion. It was not only the innumerable wagons of every description which made progress almost impossible, but the swarms of creatures which I suppose one must call "human," though there was little indication of their humanity except the power of speech, and when one had heard that, one was tempted to wish they were without it! There are veritably two Englands, the one we had just left, of green fields and clear brooks and kind hearts and noble deeds, and now this sink of iniquity. There is nothing in New York to compare with it, for, shocking as our tenement-house district is, one is comforted by the thought that it is temporary, that there is an upward trend, and that the children of the tenements--almost exclusively of foreign-born parentage--are destined to escape. But these poor creatures are predestined to "damnation" before they are born. There is all the difference between the East Side of New York and the East End of London that there is between a stream which has been defiled by the drainage of factories, but which will purify itself after it has flowed a certain number of miles, and a malarial swamp, whose stagnant waters have no power of movement and, therefore, no hope of cleansing, but will breed sickness from generation to generation. This is the reverse of the medal inscribed "As it was in the beginning," etc. Through this seething mass, then, we made our way into White Chapel, the nursery of crime, into Cannon Street, where the great wholesale houses distribute the wealth of the empire, and where the great dray-horses, almost as large as elephants, block the way, past St. Paul's, the silent witness to a faith which the life around seems to have forgotten--if it ever heard of it!--into Holborn, with its restaurants and shops and law-courts, and at last into Leicester Square, with its foreign population and its palatial music-halls. It has taken but a few moments to write this, but it took hours to drive it, and I confess when it was over I felt like the Irishman in the bottomless Sedan chair: "If it wasn't for the honor of the thing, I'd as lief walk." I had the good sense not to ask John how he felt. I could tell by looking at him: his face was white and drawn. Before we started from the Maypole, John had suggested wiring to the "Holland" for rooms, but I induced him to come here--"Garvin's Private Hotel"--instead, and now I wish I had not! The Slocums had advised me to come here rather than to one of the great caravansaries, which they said are so "Cooksy." They told me that they always stopped here, and that I should like the class of people one meets here--the county families--and also that one received that personal attention which formerly made English hotels unique, and which Americans and Germans were killing.