The expenses of the Police Courts, for 1869, was £88,240, including the salary of one Magistrate at £1,500 a year, and thirty other Magistrates at £1,200 a year, each. Sixty pounds and six shillings were expended for rattles, swords, and clubs, in the same time. The City Corporation are allowed, by act of Parliament, to have their own Police and Commissioners in the heart of the metropolis, or City proper. There is, besides, a "Horse Patrol" for public occasions; eight hundred of which were on duty on the day of the Oxford and Harvard race; a "Thames River" Police, the "Westminster Constabulary," and a "Police Office Agency," for recovery of stolen goods. Before the establishment of the Thames Police, in 1797, the annual loss by robberies alone on the river, was £750,000 a year, the depredators having various, curious names, such as "River Pirates," "Light" and "Heavy Horsemen," "Mud-larks," "Capemen," and "Scuffle-hunters." [Sidenote: RIVER THIEVES.] They were frequently known to weigh a ship's anchor, hoist it with the cable into a boat, and when discovered, to hail the captain, tell him of his loss, and row away cheerily. They also would cut shipping and lighters adrift, run them ashore and then clean them out. Many of the "Light Horsemen" cleared as much as thirty pounds a night, and an apprentice to a "mock-waterman" often kept his saddle horse and country seat. During the first year of the Thames Police, the saving to the West India merchants alone amounted to £150,000, and 2,200 river thieves were convicted during that time, of misdemeanor. In those days, the magnificent docks which are now the chief ornament of London, had not been built with their high walls to keep out the swarming thieves who haunted the shipping. [Illustration] CHAPTER XXI. HUNTING THE SEWERS. HIDDEN in the bosoms of the sewers of every Great City lies a world of romance. The secrets of thousands of human beings, with their hopes and aspirations, their defeats and disappointments, are garnered, in the relics of myriad households, whose rubbish is shot through drains, to be imbedded in the accumulated masses at the bottom of the soggy sewerage. London has two thousand miles of bricked sewers, and the entire metropolis is honey-combed by these effluvious passages. These sewers are, of course, choked with refuse and swarming with rats and other pestiferous vermin, by night and day, and are pervaded with noxious gases, which, when inhaled, cause almost instantaneous death. The rats grow as big as kittens in the sewers, and will face strong, healthy men, and give them combat--in legions. The rats feed on offal from the butchers' slaughter houses, which is poured into the sewers, and they also subsist on the grain which comes from the breweries, in different parts of the city.