give me a penny,” says a girl of about fourteen, and I find myself in the midst of a group of youthful costermongers and their wives, who have come here for a lark, just as they frequent the penny gaff, or crowd the gallery in the Victoria. I listen to their slang till I feel sick, as I think for what a future of crime and its result they are now rapidly ripening. In this Christian land can no agency be formed that shall save these young heathens? Again, I find a female standing by my side; she is horridly dirty; she stinks of gin; her face is that of the confirmed sot—of one who has given up home and husband, and comfort, and decency, for the accursed drink. She looks very piteously in my face. “And so they are going to hang the poor man,” she exclaims; “they have no mercy on him.” “You forget,” I reply, “the poor man whom he murdered, and on whom he had no mercy.” “No, I don’t,” she exclaims with tipsy gravity; “he had no right to kill the man, and ought to be punished; but ain’t we all morally bad?”—but here the conversation ends, for she has sunk down, maudlin, stinking with gin, and overcome by it and weariness, on the doorstep. Ah, these doorsteps, let us look at them. To-night the police don’t bid the _habitués_ move on. What crowds are collected on them,—ragged boys, who, perhaps, have nowhere else to sleep, wild-looking women unbonnetted and shoeless, with red, uncombed hair, faces very much marked with the small pox, only seen on such occasions as these—old men crouch on them for whom home has no charm, and life no lustre, and girls whose rouged cheeks and shabby finery tell to what wretchedness and degradation, though young in years, they have already come. Let them sleep on, if they can, on their stony mattress, beneath this inclement sky, out in this cold December night; they are happier now than they can be in their waking hours! But look at the windows, all lighted up and filled with gay company. Those two beautiful girls—let us hope they are not ladies—not English mothers or wives—who have just stepped out of the brougham, and are now gazing from a first-floor on the wild human sea beneath, will sit playing cards and drinking champagne all night; yet scarce have the sounds of Sabbath bells died away, and in a few hours a man is to be hung, and these girls, all sensibility and tears, will sit with their opera glasses during the fearful agony, as if merely Grisi acted or Mario sang.