peering out of their dingy, rag-stuffed windows, that bore traces of having once been as fair as rash Sally. Nay, the very rag-pickers who lodged in its garrets, Godbehere assured him, had many of them once been "flaunting women of the town." Women of the town, indeed, and was not the town doomed? Thomas thought that it was. To him London was already hell. The fumes of abominations choked his mental senses, and made him long to escape. Nevertheless, his mind was fixed. He could not go without his child, and in order to carry out his purpose he must work. By the friendly help of Godbehere he ultimately obtained employment in the coal yard at Paddington-wages 2s. 6d. per day. He felt rich and strong for his task henceforth, and as soon as he could he removed to a rather better lodging near his work. At a waste, as he considered it, of several evenings' lodging-seeking, he found a small clean room in the neighbourhood of Lindengrove, for which, including a plain breakfast, he paid 5s. 6d. a-week. His landlady was an elderly widow who kept three lodgers, and she rather demurred to Thomas's demand for a latch-key, so that he might go in and out at nights as he pleased, but his sad, earnest face, and his remark that he was looking for a lost daughter, conquered her fears. Thomas had his key, and felt a kind of thankfulness that if he did find Sally he could now bring her to a better refuge than the vermin-filled hole in Agar Town. Five weeks had well-nigh passed, and Thomas was no nearer his object, to all appearance, than the day he arrived in London. But now that he had work he felt more assured of his purpose, and therefore less sad. So he sent home cheery letters to his wife, bidding her hope yet for Sally, telling her he felt that God would not forsake her or them. All his letters his wife got read to her by the schoolmaster, and then passed them on to Jane. Money he would have sent, but could not. All that was left after paying his food and the clothes he needed for his work he spent in his quest. For work did not cause him to abate his vigilance, nor did it much reduce his wanderings. As soon as the yard closed he hurried home, changed his clothes, swallowed a cup of tea, and, sometimes on foot, sometimes on the top of an omnibus, he made his way to the usual haunts of vice. There he would wander, haunting theatre doors, peering into refreshment bars, and sometimes spending sixpence to get inside a low music hall. The sights he saw froze his very heart's blood with horror, and he often asked himself--Is all this vice, then, the product of our civilisation? Where is the Christianity in the habits of a people who permit tens of thousands of their fellow beings to rot and perish as a matter of course, and prate about the social evil in their sleek respectable way as if it was a dispensation of heaven? How many of these poor girls, whose lives had been blasted, who now brazenly