But though the habits and customs and source of income of the inhabitants of the lower portion of the houses in Little Queer Street are thus openly demonstrated, the rest is all mystery. How the second, third, and fourth floors get their living, what they are, and what they do, it would be a difficult matter to explain. Most of them evidently have very small incomes and very large families. There are more children of all sizes and conditions in Little Queer Street than in any other street in the United Kingdom. Almost every female carries a baby, and some females carry two. There are children in heaps at the corner of the street, children on the doorsteps, children in the gutter, children under the wheels of hansom cabs, up the lamp-posts, hanging over the window-sills, crowding the staircases, lying in the areas, rolling with the cabbage-stalks under the stalls, swarming and crawling all day long among the crowd, laughing, crying, screaming, and playing, unheeded, uncared for, unowned. Their hair is rough and matted, their little hands are black with mud, their faces are grimed with dirt, and often, alas! scarred with disease. Sometimes they get lost, every now and then one or two will be run over by a cab or a brewer’s dray, and sometimes an epidemic will swoop down upon Little Queer Street, and thin the ranks of the great gutter army, and make more room for the remainder. All day long these human waifs loiter in the street, at the peril of life and limb. They have no regular meal-times. They get a slice of bread-and-butter, occasionally a slice of bread-and-treacle, at irregular periods, and this constitutes their staple sustenance. Many of them are turned out at seven, when mother and father go to work, and called in again at whatever hour it may suit father and mother to return. It is considered safer to leave them outside than in. Out of doors they may get killed; indoors they might damage the ‘furniture’ or set fire to the house. Two days after Edward Marston’s strange meeting with Dr. Birnie, a little girl sat at one of the open doorways in Little Queer Street, gazing vacantly at the busy scene around her. A stranger would have been instantly attracted by the extraordinary appearance of her face. _It was quite clean_. Her hair was neatly brushed, and over her plain little brown merino frock she actually wore a white pinafore. Not only would a stranger be struck with amazement at the phenomenal appearance—a clean and tidy little girl on a Little Queer Street door-step—but the inhabitants have been for a long time so struck with it that Gertie Heckett, the child in question, has become quite a local celebrity. ‘That gal ‘ll die a orful death,’ said Mrs. Maloney, of the fish-shop at the corner, to her next-door neighbour, Mrs. Moss. ‘Larst night she came for a pen’orth o’ fried fish, and I guv her a ha’penny too much change out o’ sixpence, and she guv it me back.’