On a Saturday night, in the great thoroughfare adjacent, there are three corner public-houses which take as much money as the whole of the other shops on both sides of the way put together. Butchers, bakers, greengrocers, clothiers, furniture dealers, all the caterers for the wants of the populace, are open till a late hour; there are hundreds of them trading round and about, but the whole lot do not take as much money as three publicans--that is a fact ghastly enough in all conscience. Enter the public-houses, and you will see them crammed. Here are artisans and labourers drinking away the wages that ought to clothe their little ones. Here are the women squandering the money that would purchase food, for the lack of which their children are dying. One group rivets the eye of an observer at once. It consists of an old gray-haired dame, a woman of forty, and a girl of about nineteen with a baby in her arms. All these are in a state which is best described as 'maudlin'--they have finished one lot of gin, and the youngest woman is ordering another round. It is a great-grandmother, grandmother, and a mother and her baby--four generations together--and they are all dirty and dishevelled and drunk except the baby, and even that poor little mite may have its first taste of alcohol presently. It is no uncommon sight in these places to see a mother wet a baby's lips with gin-and-water. The process is called 'giving the young'un a taste,' and the baby's father will look on sometimes and enjoy the joke immensely. But the time to see the result of a Saturday night's heavy drinking in a low neighbourhood is after the houses are closed. Then you meet dozens of poor wretches reefing home to their miserable dens; some of them roll across the roadway and fall, cutting themselves till the blood flows. Every penny in some instances has gone in drink. One dilapidated, ragged wretch I met last Saturday night was gnawing a baked potato. By his side stood a thinly-clad woman bearing a baby in her arms, and in hideous language she reproached him for his selfishness. She had fetched him out of a public-house with his last halfpenny in his pocket. With that halfpenny he had bought the potato, which he refused to share with her. At every corner the police are ordering or coaxing men and women to 'move on.' Between twelve and one it is a long procession of drunken men and women, and the most drunken seem to be those whose outward appearance betokens the most abject poverty.