Here we close our journey and our records at a funeral. Well, the finale is not inappropriate. Have we not been attending the funerals of so many gay and bright and sparkling, joyfully leaping and rushing, and sometimes roaring, brooks and rivers, descending from the sunny hillsides, finally to be buried in dark and noisome sewers? And the lost river, alas! is but too often the type of the lost life. But moralizing is not in our line—we think it sad waste of time; it is no better than doctors’ prescriptions. We would rather remind the reader, who in these notes may miss elegance of style and picturesqueness of description, that such qualities were incompatible with the compactness of details the space at our command imposed upon us. Besides, a more florid style must borrow something from imagination; but here we had only to deal with facts, and if the reader finds as much pleasure in studying as we did in collecting them, though the labour was great, he will not regret the time bestowed on their perusal. *XVI.* *ROGUES ASSORTED.* On Horwood’s Map of London, dated 1799, just one hundred years ago, there is shown a road, starting from Blue Anchor Lane, Bermondsey, at almost a right angle to the latter, and running in an easterly direction, but with a considerable curve in it, and this road is called Rogues’ Lane. It is more than half a mile long, perfectly solitary, not a house on or near it, the land around it being a wild waste, and as deserted as a lonely moor in the recesses of Wales or Cornwall. How did this lane acquire its name? Did the inhabitants of the East End of London construct it as a kind of sewer for carrying off into the outlying wilderness the rogues who infested their streets? or did the rogues of that day, openly or tacitly acknowledging themselves to be such, choose the lane as a kind of rendezvous, as a sort of peripatetic exchange for the transaction of their rascally schemes? The East End of London seems, indeed, in those days, to have been a favourite resort of rogues—Stepney had its Rogues’ Well—now they prefer the West End. But the rogues of old were somewhat different from the modern specimens; they were chiefly thieves, footpads, burglars, sneaks, low cheats, sham cripples, and such mean fry—modern civilization, with its panacea of education, had not yet asserted itself. Culture, which licks all the world into shape, has even reached the rogues; the petty scoundrels of old are replaced by the magnificent swindlers of the present day, who deal not in paltry pence, but in weighty sovereigns—who do not cheat a silly countryman out of the few shillings his purse may contain, but wheedle trusting spinsters and mad and greedy speculators out of thousands of pounds. The modern rogue is either a promoter of bogus companies, or a director who issues bogus shares, an embezzling bank-manager or trustee, or a man who lives far beyond his means, even