It is difficult, indeed, to imagine a human creature more deplorably circumstanced than the one whose sad story is above narrated, and who is only “one of a thousand.” There are those of the sisterhood who appear in a more hideous shape, as, for instance, the horde of human tigresses who swarm in the pestilent dens by the riverside at Ratcliff and Shadwell. These may have fallen lower in depravity, indeed they are herded in the very mud and ooze of it, but they do not _suffer_ as the gaily-bedizened “dress lodger” does. They are almost past human feeling. Except when they are ill and in hospital, they are never sober. As soon as her eyes are open in the morning, the she-creature of “Tiger Bay” seeks to cool her parched mouth out of the gin-bottle; and “— your eyes, let us have some more gin!” is the prayer she nightly utters before she staggers to her straw, to snore like the worse than pig she is. Soldiers’ women are different from sailors’ women. As a rule, they are much more decent in appearance, and they are insured against habits of bestial intoxication by the slender resources of the men on whose bounty they depend. It is not possible to dip very deeply into the wine-cup or even the porter-pot on an income of about fourpence-halfpenny per diem, and it painfully illustrates what a wretched trade prostitution may become that it is driven even to the barracks. Beyond the barracks; out on to the wild bleak common, where, winter and summer, the military tents are pitched.