Saturday night in South London is a particularly busy time for the wives of the working classes. The chief thoroughfares in that great district lying between Waterloo Bridge and Camberwell Green are rendered bright by the flare of the naphtha-lamps of hoarse-voiced costermongers, whose strident cries call attention to their rather unwholesome-looking wares, and the crowds of honest housewives with ponderous baskets on their arms are marketing in couples and threes, taking their weekly outing, which is never to be missed. In the Walworth Road on a Saturday evening one can perhaps obtain a better glimpse of London lower-class life than in any other thoroughfare. The great broad road extending from that junction of thoroughfares, the Elephant and Castle, straight away to the site of old Camberwell Gate, and thence to the once rural but now sadly deteriorated Camberwell Green, is ablaze with gas and petroleum, and agog with movement. The honest, hard-working costermongers, with their barrows drawn into the gutters, vie with the shops in prices and quality; hawkers of all sorts importune passers-by on the congested pavements; the hatless and oleaginous butchers implore the crowd to "Buy, buy, buy," and the whole thoroughfare presents a scene of animation unequalled in the whole metropolis--a striking panorama of poverty, pinched faces, shabby clothes, and enforced economy. The district between the Elephant and Camberwell Green has fallen upon evil days. Those who knew the Walworth Road twenty years ago, and know it now, will have marked its decadence with regret; how the lower life of East Street, known locally as Eas' Lane, has overflowed; how fine old houses, once tenanted by merchants and people of independent means, are now let out in tenements; how model "flats" have reared their ugly heads; how the jerry-builder has swallowed up Walworth Common, across which Dickens once loved to wander; how all has changed, and Walworth has become the Whitechapel of the south. Life in Walworth is the lower life of modern Cockneydom. There are streets in the district which, highly respectable thoroughfares twenty years ago, now harbour some of the worst characters in London; streets which, although a stone's throw from the noisy, squalid bustle of the Walworth Road, a policeman hardly cares to venture down without a companion; sunless streets where poverty and crime are hand in hand, where filth has bred disease, and where stunted, pale-faced children wallow in the gutter mire. The wreckage of London life now no longer drifts towards the east, as it used to do, but crosses the Thames, and, after struggling in Lambeth, is swallowed in the debasing vortex of wretched, wonderful Walworth.