Ever to common eyes the same appearances in Kent Street. The bustle of a cheap trade in its shops; the knots of thieves and loose-livers at every narrow turning; the murmurs of unseen disputants, in the true London vernacular, welling from dark entries and up-stairs rooms; the shoals of children, hatless, shoeless, almost garmentless--all a medley of sights and sounds, increasing towards night-fall, when Kent Street is full of horror, and lives and purses are not safe there. It is eleven in the evening of the same day, in which our story opens, and Mrs. Sarah Jane Watts, baggy as regards costume, and unsteady as regards her legs, was standing in the doorway of her domicile, inspecting, by the light of the candle in her hand, a trinket of some kind, which had been proffered her by a smaller mortal, infinitely more ragged than herself. "You got it honestly--I takes your word for it--you allers was a gal who spoke the truth, I will say that for you--it's a sham affair, and brassy as a knocker--say eightpence?" "It's really gold, Mrs. Watts--it's worth a heap of money." "It's the brassiest thing that ever I clapped eyes on--say eightpence and a bit of supper?" "What sort o' supper?" "Hot supper--tripe and inguns--as much as you can pad with." "It's worth a sight more, if it's gold." "I'll ask Simes--go up-stairs and wait a minit'--Simes'll tell us if it's gold, and praps stand more for it. I don't want the thing--I don't think it's safe to keep, myself; and if you've prigged it, Mattie, why, you'd better let it go." "Very well." Mattie--the girl whom we have watched in the dark entry of Mr. Wesden's door, wearied out with Mrs. Watts' loquacity, or overpowered by her arguments, went up-stairs into a room on the first floor. A long, low-ceilinged room, containing three beds, and each bed containing four women and a few supplementary children, one affected with a whooping-cough that was evidently fast racking it to death. This was the feminine dormitory of Mrs. Watts--a place well known to London women in search of a night's rest, Southwark way--a place for the ballad singer who had twopence to spend, or a soul above the workhouse; for the beggar-women who had whined about the streets all day; for the tramps passing from Surrey to Essex, and taking London _en route_; for women of all callings, who were deplorably poor, idle or vicious--it mattered not, so that they paid Mrs. Watts her claim upon them.