He was musing and dreaming still as the carriages took the party to the East End of London. But when Bishopsgate was passed at last, he threw his thoughts from him with a great effort, and became once more the keen and eager leader of those people whom he had brought to see the ultimate horror of the Modern Babylon. They sent the carriages away at a certain turning in the Whitechapel Road. Then they plunged into the dark. And how dark that darkness is! Fiction can hardly tell--fiction must not tell, fearing to infringe upon the bitterness and the agony of the truth. For we who write of things as they are must always consider our audience. Ask General Booth, G. R. Sims, or Mr. Holmes, the police-court missionary, what is the measure of this darkness. Ask the modern martyrs of our day, of all sects and creeds, who labor in these hell-ridden places. Ask, and you shall hear nothing but the tolling of a great bell, the deep and awful sound of immedicable misery, the iron pæan of the blackness of sin, the deep and ringing wail of the mighty bell--the iron bell--which tolls of hopelessness, and voices the cry of the downtrodden, the oppressed, the lost! The slaves of the Modern Babylon! But with one difference. In the walled city of wickedness between the two great rivers, hope had not come. They could not know that our Lord was to be born of a pure Virgin to save them---- Thoughts akin to these were in the minds of all of them as they went in and out of the foul slums of the East. Sir Thomas Ducaine was covered with shame as he saw the horrors all around--horrors existing upon his own property, long unregarded and unknown. But the young man was not the only one among them who registered a mental vow to do all that he could for the wretched beings they had come amongst. Sir Augustus Kirwan, though he had taken the chair at many philanthropic meetings, and though his name often headed important subscription lists, had never really been brought in contact, in actual personal contact, with the great open wound of London. The party had come to the mouth of a particularly evil-looking alley. There is character in brick and stone, and this place--"Wilson's Rents" by name--had a sinister cut-throat aspect in every line of it. "What is in there?" Sir Augustus asked one of the police inspectors. "It's a particularly bad street, Sir Augustus," the man answered. "A sort of great human rabbit-warren or rat's run, as you may say. The houses nearly all communicate through cellars and subterranean passages." "Shall we go down here?" Sir Augustus asked Joseph. "I should not advise it, sir," said the policeman. "The people are so dirty and degraded and disgusting in their habits that they hardly resemble human beings at all."