The shops in Lock's Fields are naturally in keeping with the means and habits of their customers. Beer-shops and public-houses abound: the lower and the poorer the locality, the greater the number of such establishments. But who can wonder? Crime requires its stimulants—and poverty its consolation. Men drink to nerve themselves to perpetrate misdeeds which are attended with peril: women drink to supply that artificial flow of spirits necessary to the maintenance of a career of prostitution;—and the honest poor drink to save themselves from the access of maddening despair. Children drink also, because they see their parents drink, and because they have acquired the taste from their earliest infancy;—and thus beer-shops and public-houses thrive most gloriously in the most wretched neighbourhoods. Lock's Fields abound with small "general shops," where every thing is sold in the minutest detail—a pennyworth of sugar, a penny-farthing-worth of tea, a farthing candle, or a quarter of a pound of bacon for a penny. There are also many eating-houses where leg-of-beef soup can be procured for five farthings the bowl. The knackers do a good business with the owners of those establishments. Tripe-shops are likewise far from rare; and upon their boards in the open windows, may be seen gory slices of black-looking liver, tongues and brains in a dish, sheep's heads, huge cow-heels, chitterlings, piles of horses' flesh and rolls of boiled offal upon sticks—the two last-mentioned species of article being intended for cat's-meat,—but the whole heaped pell-mell together, loathsome to behold, and emitting odours of the most fœtid and nauseating description. Coal-sheds, where potatoes and greens may likewise be purchased, abound in Lock's Fields; as do also pie-shops and that kind of eating-houses where pudding fried in grease, stocking-pudding, and sop-in-the-pan are displayed in the windows, to tempt with their succulent appearance the appetites of hungry men passing to their work, or of half-famished children wearied of playing in the gutter.