His companion merely gave a grunt, for the policeman was by this time near; and they walked on together, across various streets and through various alleys which led into Oxford Street. It is curious and sad that in some of the most fashionable parts of the town of London, within a stone's throw of the mansions of the opulent and great, are, or at least were some twenty years ago, an immense mass of the lowest and most squalid houses in the metropolis. Close by Grosvenor and Manchester Squares, and lying between them and Bond Street, are a number of places in which it was dangerous, as the writer once found to his cost, for a respectably-dressed person to set his foot. There, congregated tier above tier, in small, dark, unwholesome rooms, are whole classes of people, in comparison with whom the denizens of Saint Giles's may be looked upon as aristocracy. If you walk along one of these courts or alleys, the first things you remark, on the right hand and the left, are the two confederates in demoralization and degradation, the pawnbroker's and the gin-shop, both tolerated and encouraged by the British government on account of those iniquitous and burdensome taxes grouped under the name of excise--taxes which, whatever they may do for the revenue, tend more to hamper industry, to debase the people, to make rogues of honest men, to prevent the employment of the poor, to give monopoly to the rich, to obstruct salutary laws, and to disgrace the legislature, than any imposts that ever were invented by the great British demon, Taxation. The fact is, ministers dare not deal with the gin-shop nuisance as they would with any other nuisance, for fear of diminishing the revenue; and when they come before parliament and boast of an increased revenue from the excise--which they call the barometer of commercial prosperity--they boast, in fact, of how much they have been able to wring from the vices, the follies, or the hard labours of the industrious classes. They say neither more nor less than this: there must have been more demand for labour, because the labouring classes have been able to drink more gin, to smoke more tobacco, and to swill more beer. This is a very irrelevant tirade, but it would be written. Beyond the pawnbroker's and the gin-shop, you enter into the heart of the den; probably meeting, at the first two or three steps, some half-clad women, with foul matted hair, strange-shaped caps which were once white, and yellowish handkerchiefs loosely spread over the otherwise uncovered bosom. Perhaps there is a short pipe in the mouth; but there is gin in every hue of the face, and the eyes are bleared and inflamed with habitual intoxication.