Some of the facts about the water-supply are not easy to deal with in a book for general reading. The difficulties of the 'drawer of water' are great. It was while I and my esteemed collaborator were debating how we could possibly reproduce much that we had seen in connection with this crying evil that a gentleman came along and gave us the chance of at least one sketch 'on the spot.' He made himself busy at the side of a tub--a tub from which his neighbours will fill their drinking and their culinary vessels anon. Do not imagine that he is engaged in his morning ablution. He is washing his potatoes--that is all--and in the evening he will take them out baked, and sell them in the public highway. For the sake of the public I am glad they will be baked, but though the water will in some instances be boiled, I don't think that tea is improved by the dirt off potato-skins--at least, I have never heard so. Perhaps at the house where we saw this tub the inhabitants were not so much injured as they might have been by the deficient water-supply in the yard. If they didn't get water in one way, they generally had it in another. The law of compensation is always at work, and the rapacity of a landlord who left his tenants so badly off in one particular way may have been a godsend in another. The water in rainy weather simply poured through the roof of this house, saturating the sleepers in their beds and washing their faces in a rough-and-ready manner, but unfortunately it didn't rain towels at the same time, so that the bath had its inconveniences. The cause of these periodical shower-baths was pointed out to us by a tenant who paid four and sixpence a week for his 'watery nest' in the attic, and who, in language which did not tend to show that his enforced cleanliness had brought godliness in its train, explained that the landlord had taken the lead from the roof and sold it, and replaced it with asphalte, which had cracked, with the result above described. Unacquainted with the stern necessities of the situation, you will contemplate the picture and say that these people are idiots to pay rent for such accommodation. What are they to do? Move. Whither? They know well how they will have to tramp from slum to slum, losing work, and the difficulties which will beset them on this room-hunt. They are thankful to have a roof, even with cracks in it, and they will go on suffering--not in silence, perhaps, but without taking action, because they know if they go further they may fare worse. The accommodation which these people will put up with is almost incredible. Some of the houses are as absolutely dangerous to life and limb as those specially built up on the stage as pitfalls for the unwary feet of the melodramatic heroes and heroines led there by designing villains in order that they may fall through traps into dark rivers, and so be got rid of.