I have said that the Old Kent Road is eminently respectable; and so it is. But it is also (the natural sequence of respectability) not less eminently dull. It is only when Saturday evening comes, with its street-market commencing as the light dies out of the sky, that this long road becomes really interesting. Then it takes on an aspect of mystery, and is filled with flickering lights and shadows from the yellow gas-lamps and the gusty naphtha-flares that illuminate the dealings of Mr. 'Enery 'Awkins with his clients; and I am quite sure that, if Rembrandt was living now, he would choose such a time and place as the best subject for a picture in all London. One spot in especial he would select. Taking a tramcar from the "Elephant and Castle," he would ask the conductor to set him down by the bridge that crosses the Grand Surrey Canal, where the great gasometers of the South London Gas Company rear themselves high in air above mean houses and third-rate shops. Arrived here, he would select, as the best point of view, the broad entrance of a large public-house, outside of which the omnibuses stop in their career between the Borough and New Cross; and it is very likely that the thing which happened to me while sketching here would also befall him; that is to say, some short-sighted or dull-witted old lady would probably dig him in the ribs with the ferrule of her umbrella, and say, "Young man, how long before your 'bus starts?" And, after all, I suppose one must not be satirical at the expense of that very worthy person the British matron; for, to a superficial glance, a sketch-block may be not unlike an omnibus way-bill; and who but a mad impressionist would see sketchable material in an ugly gasometer? And who other than a reckless Bohemian would be so far indifferent to public opinion as to sketch outside a gin-palace? [Illustration: SATURDAY NIGHT IN THE OLD KENT ROAD.] The Old Kent Road of from seventy to eighty years ago presented a very different aspect from that with which those are familiar who travel nowadays up and down its great length in tramcars. It was distinctly rural. The few houses that were to be seen here in coaching days were chiefly inns, with swinging signs creaking, and horse-troughs lining the roadside, and the "Kentish Drovers," that now wears much the same appearance as any other London public-house, was a veritable rustic house of call for countrymen driving their sheep and cattle to London markets. "The Bricklayers' Arms" (a 'scutcheon, needless to say, unknown to heraldry), "The World Turned Upside Down," the "Thomas a Becket," and the "Golden Cross," at New Cross, were scarcely less rural. It was at the "Golden Cross" that Pitt and Dundas, overtaken on the road from Dover to London by bad weather, put up for the night, and drank seven bottles of port before they went to bed.