In the neighbourhood of the great stations where the mail trains arrive between three and four o'clock in the morning, there is a sense of "life going on" that attracts a certain kind of loafer--a nondescript lounger totally different from the back-against-the-wall specimen of the daytime. If some of those people who are attracted to centres of movement during the small hours could be tracked to their homes, we should be astonished to find that a good many of them are in respectable circumstances. They are generally men living alone, either bachelors or widowers, and some of them are professional men and the victims of insomnia. There are men who get up constantly in the middle of the night and go out "to get rid of their thoughts," as one of the victims of this peculiar form of distraction once told me. These men haunt the streets in the dead of night; but they do not choose the lonely places, they want to see their fellow-men who are still awake and about, and the railway station with its bustle in the middle of the night has a peculiar attraction for them. They wait about on the platform, most of them, as if they were going to meet friends; they watch the cabs away until the last luggage-laden four-wheeler has crawled out of the station, and then when the lights are turned down they go slowly out into the street again to make their own way home. There is one phase of London at the dead of night which is remarkable, but it is not advisable to investigate it if you are alone. To see it you must spend an hour or two in "the streets with the open doors," and these streets are not to be recommended to the stranger between the hours of I and 4 a.m. Picture to yourself a long row of three-storey houses, grimy, monotonous, dilapidated. There is not one house that has not broken window-panes, either stuffed with rag or pasted across with newspaper. The stucco has peeled away in many places. Where it is left it is black with grime. To each of these houses there is a front door. But it has no knocker, and by the side of it are no bells. Passed through the hole in the door, intended originally for a key, there is a short piece of cord or string. The string is there that the inmates may, if so minded, open or pull the door to after them. These doors are never bolted or locked. If they were the tenants would be seriously inconvenienced, because they come in at all hours of the night, and pass up the broken, dilapidated stairways to their rooms. If you waited at the end of the street through the small hours you would occasionally see rough-looking men come slouching along on their way home. When one of these men reaches the door of his residence he either pushes it open with his hand or his shoulder, or, if he is not in an amiable mood, he probably kicks it open.