The story of one slum is the story of another, and all are unrelieved by the smallest patch of that colour which lends a charm to pictures of our poorest peasantry. God made the country, they say, and man made the town; and wretched as is the lot of the agricultural labourer, the handiwork of Heaven still remains to give some relief to the surroundings of his miserable life. Field and tree and flower, the green of the meadow and the hedge, the gold and white of buttercup and daisy, the bright hues of the wild cottage garden--it is in the midst of these the pigsties of the rustic poor are pitched, and there is scope for the artist's brush. But in the slums he can use but one colour; all is a monotone--a sombre gray deepening into the blackness of night. Even the blue, that in the far-off skies seems to defy the man-made town to be utterly colourless, is obscured by the smoke belched forth from a hundred chimneys; and even the sun, which shines with systematic impartiality on the righteous and the unrighteous alike, is foiled in its efforts to get at these outcasts by the cunning builders, who have put house so close to house that even a sunbeam which had trained down to the proportions of Mdlle. Sarah Bernhardt, and then been flattened by a steam-roller, could not force its way between the overhanging parapets with any chance of getting to the ground. So what sunshine there is stops on the roofs among the chimney-pots, and is the sole property of the cats of the neighbourhood, who may be seen dozing about in dozens, or indulging in a pastime which they have certainly not learnt of their masters and mistresses, namely, washing their faces. The cat-life of the slums is peculiar. Dogs are rare, but the cats are as common as blackberries in September. Not over-clean and not over-fat, the cats of the slums yet seem perfectly contented, and rarely leave the district in which they have been reared. They ascend to the roof early in the day, and stay there long after darkness has set in, and in the choice of a local habitation they show their feline sense. The rooms of their respective owners offer neither air nor sunshine, and when 'the family' are all at home it is possibly the inability of finding even a vacant corner to curl up in that drives Thomas to that part of a house which the people of the East consider the best, but which the people of our East have never sought to utilize. The cats of the slums are certainly domesticated: they marry and have families, and the kittens are the only really pretty things we have seen since we started on our explorations.