Look in at one of the kitchens to-day. Tea with bread and butter, bacon, haddocks, bloaters, and cold fried fish are among the breakfast "relishes" on the table, and in a frying-pan on the fire one stalwart tramp is cooking himself a pork chop. The man's wallet stowed away on a shelf in the kitchen contains nothing but a few old rags and bits of rubbish picked up by the wayside. But he makes enough somehow to pay for his night's lodging and a good meat breakfast, and you will see him, as soon as the public-house at the corner opens, investing more money in the purchase of a stimulant to assist the digestion of the pork chop. There is always a public-house near a doss-house, and it is liberally patronized by the lodgers. With all their apparent poverty they find money to visit the gin-palace two or three times in the course of as many hours. I have seen the same group of women from a notorious doss-house go into a public-house four times in an hour. Two of them were miserably clad, and limped painfully in boots that scarcely held together. If it is astonishing that men and women who have so much money to spend in drink can put up with the shelter of the lowest of the common lodging-houses in London, it is still more astonishing that men, and sometimes women, of wealth should habitually resort to them. Yet in a doss-house in Bangor Street, Notting Dale, a woman lodged regularly, who, at the time of her death, had standing to her credit at a local bank several hundred pounds, In a fourpenny lodging-house in Great Peter Street, Westminster, a man who was taken ill and removed to a hospital was found to have upon him a money-belt which contained bank-notes to the value of sixty pounds. In a lodging-house in the Mint--one of a better kind, run in connection with a temperance mission, the lodging-house, in fact, in the kitchen of which the first free meals provided by the "Referee" Children's Dinner Fund were prepared--a man died who was supposed to be almost destitute; so poor and miserable was he, that his bed was paid for every week by a kindly clergyman interested in the mission. This old fellow used to go to Covent Garden in the morning, pick up vegetable refuse, and bring it back with him and make soup of it. He picked up something one day that made him seriously ill. He was taken to the hospital, and died there, and in the battered old box which he left behind him at the lodging-house were discovered securities for a very large sum of money, and a banker's pass-book with all the entries on the credit side, and not a single one on the debit side. The mysteries of the common lodging-houses of London are not always the mysteries of Poverty and Crime. CHAPTER V--THE WAYS OF CRIME _How big house robberies are planned--The up-to-date burglar--The fine art of crime--The brutal assaults that are paid for--How a man is marked--An assault that became murder._