For a penny the young thief or abandoned street girl can listen to hoarse fiddling, obscene jests, and the lowest of low slang songs at some penny "gaff" in Whitechapel, and on a benefit night at Covent Garden, or the Haymarket, the man who is known in society will have to pay twenty-five or thirty shillings or from six to ten dollars to hear the musical warblings of a Patti or a Nillson. There are one hundred and three hospitals in London in which all the complaints, frailties, and mishaps of poor human nature are supposed to be provided for, and yet it will be much easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle, or a rich man to get a free pass into paradise, than that a poor wretch without friends or influence should be able to find a bed in an hospital, unless he can succeed by a miracle in dodging the sentinels which red tape has placed at every entrance to these vaunted institutions. Down in the quiet and aristocratic dwellings of Pimlico, you shall find such ladies as "Nelly Holmes," or "Skittles," and in St. John's Wood a "Mabel Gray," and in a delicious villa at Fulham, a "Formosa," spending in one night's Corinthian revelry the yearly salary of a bank clerk, or hazarding at a game of cards the life-time pittance of a sewing woman. And with these painted women shall be found night after night the curled darlings of the Pall Mall clubs, some of them mere youths who bear names as old as Magna Charta, and once as spotless perhaps as those of Sidney or Hampden. At Blanchard's, in Regent street, you may dine for a pound upon the choicest variety of dishes, cooked by a French _Chef_, who would scorn a gift of the Order of the Garter were it given to him without the proper culinary brevet to accompany it; and at a ham and beef shop in Oxford street you may fill yourself to repletion, taking as a basis a pork saveloy for a penny, a "penn'orth" of bread as a second layer, a mutton-pie for "tuppence," a tart for a penny, and a pint of porter for "tuppence," and then as a relish of a literary kind, you can look at the great evening paper of London, the _Echo_, written in the most scholarly English, without any fee. Or you can go down Camden Town way, or up into Tottenham Court Road and get a kidney pie for two pence, or an eel stew for two-pence half penny, with a dry bun for a penny, and a good glass of Bass's ale for three half pence. And then you can go to Morley's or the Langham Hotel and pick your teeth and no one will be the wiser.