Poverty of an ill aspect set in soon after the frost; crime set in soon after poverty--when the workhouses are besieged by hungry claimants for relief, the prisons are always extra full. Suffolk Street, the streets branching thitherwards to Southwark Bridge, the narrow lanes and turnings round the Queen's Bench, in the Borough Road and verging towards Union Street, were all haunted by those phantoms that had set in with the frost--there was danger in the streets as well as famine, and money was hard to earn, and hold when earned! Small shopkeepers with large families closed their shutters and locked themselves in with desolation; men out of work grew desperate--the streets were empty of the basket women and costermongers, and swarming in lieu thereof with beggars and thieves; even the police, nipped at the heart by the frost, were harder on society that stopped the way, and had little mercy even on old faces. Mattie's was an old face which stopped the way at that time--Mattie, basketless and onionless, and trying lucifers again, and essaying on Saturday nights--when workmen's wages were paid--a song or two opposite the public-houses. In this old fashion, Mattie earned a few pence at times; she was small for her age--very small--and the anxious-looking face touched those who had odd coppers to spare. But it was a task to live notwithstanding, and Mattie fought hard with the rest of the waifs and strays who had a tough battle to wage that winter time. "Luck went dead against her," as she termed it; she was barred from the market by want of capital--one lot of goods that she had speculated in never went off her hands, or rather her basket, on which they withered more and more with the frost, until they became unsaleable products--and there was no demand for lucifers or anything! Mattie was nearly starving when the old tempter turned up in Great Suffolk Street--at the time when she was weak, and the police had been more than commonly "down on her," and she had not taken a halfpenny that day--at a time when the tempter _does_ turn up as a general pile, that is, when we are waiting very anxiously for an EXCUSE. "What! Mattie!--Lor! the sight o' time since I set eyes on you!" "What! Mrs. Watts!" "What are you doing, girl?--not much for yourself, I should think," with a disparaging glance at the tattered habiliments of our heroine. "Not much just now, Mrs. Watts--hard lines it is." "Ah! well, it may be--you allus wanted pluck, Mattie, like your mother. And hard lines it is just now, for those who stand nice about trifles. What's that in your hand, gal?" "Congreve lights." "What! still at Congreve lights--if I shouldn't hate the werry sight and smell on 'em by this time." "So I do," said Mattie, sullenly. "Come home with me, and let's have a bit o' talk together, Mattie--there's a friend or two o' your age a-coming to have a little talk with me to-night." "Don't you keep a lodging house now?"