The shot hits the mark, and we leave the Protestant darkie grinning at his own success, and debating with his wife what will be the best article in which to invest for the day's market. Honest folks enough in their way, these--keeping themselves to themselves and struggling on as best they can, now 'making a bit over,' and now wondering where on earth the next sixpence is to come from. Just up the street is a house with an inscription over it which tells us we can find within a very different class to study. This is a licensed lodging-house, where you can be accommodated for fourpence or sixpence a night. This payment gives you during the day the privilege of using the common kitchen, and it is into the common kitchen we are going. We walk into the passage, and are stopped by a strapping young woman of about eight-and-twenty. She is the deputy. 'What do we want?' Once again the password is given, and the attitude of the lady changes. She formally conducts us into a large room, where the strangest collection of human beings are crowded together. It is sheet-washing day, and there is a great fire roaring up the chimney. Its ruddy glare gives a Rembrandtish tone to the picture. Tables and forms run round, the room, and there is not a vacant place.' Men, women, and children are lolling about, though it is mid-day, apparently with nothing to do but make themselves comfortable. The company is not a pleasant one. Many of the men and women and boys are thieves. Almost every form of disease, almost every kind of deformity, seems crowded into this Chamber of Horrors. The features are mostly repulsive; an attractive face there is not among the sixty or seventy human beings in the room. Some of them are tramps and hawkers, but most of them are professional loafers, picking up in any way that presents itself the price of a night's lodging. They are a shifting population, and rarely remain in one house long. Some of them only get a night in now and then as a luxury, and look upon it as a Grand Hotel episode. They sleep habitually in the open, on the staircases, or in the casual ward. The house we are in is one where Nancy and Sikes come often enough when they are down on their luck. Here is a true story of this very place, which will perhaps illustrate sufficiently the type of its frequenters. Some time last year two men left the house one morning. They were going into the country on business. One, whom I will call John, kissed his mistress, a girl of twenty, and said 'Good-bye,' leaving her at the house; he wouldn't be away long, and he and Bill, his companion, set out on their travels.