Ousted from Slusher’s Alley, they sought Grimes’s Rents. Grimes’s Rents were already fully occupied by renters, but the present was a calamity that might overtake anyone, and the desired shelter was not refused. It was a mere matter of packing a little closer. The donkey that lodged in the cellar was turned into the wash-house, and there was a commodious apartment for a large family, and nothing was easier than to rig up an old counterpane on an extended string, so converting one chamber into two. Hard as it is to believe, and in mockery of all our Acts of Parliament for the better ordering of lodging-houses, and our legal enactments regulating the number of cubic feet of air every lodger was entitled to and might insist on, in hundreds of cases this condition of things exists at the present writing. Within a stone’s cast of the Houses of Parliament, where sit six hundred wise gentlemen empanelled to make what laws they please for improving the condition of the people, every one of the said six hundred being an educated man of liberal mind, and fully recognising the Christian maxim that godliness and cleanliness are identical, may be found human creatures housed in places that would ruin the health of a country-bred pig were he removed thereto. In these same places parents and grown up and little children herd in the same room night and day. Sickness does not break up the party, or even the presence of grim Death himself. Singularly enough, however, more ceremony is observed with new life than with old Death. A missionary friend related to me the case of a family of five inhabiting one small room, and the youngest boy, aged thirteen, died. The domestic arrangements, however, were not in the least disturbed by the melancholy event; the lad’s coffin was laid against the wall, and meals were cooked and eaten and the two beds made and occupied as usual until the day of burial. A little while after, however, the mother gave birth to a child, and my friend visiting the family found it grouped on the landing partaking of a rough-and-ready tea. It was voted “undacent to be inthrudin’” until next day. However, the decent scruples of the head of the family did not hold out beyond that time, and by the evening of the next day the old order of things was quite restored. How in the name of goodness and humanity can we, under such circumstances, hope to be delivered from the curse of neglected children? II.—Professional Thieves. CHAPTER VI. THEIR NUMBER AND THEIR DIFFICULTIES. _Twenty Thousand Thieves in London_.—_What it Means_.—_The Language of_ “_Weeds_.”—_Cleverness of the Pilfering Fraternity_.—_A Protest Against a Barbarous Suggestion_.—_The Prisoner’s great Difficulty_.—_The Moment of Leaving Prison_.—_Bad Friends_.—_What Becomes of Good Resolutions and the Chaplain’s Counsel_?—_The Criminal’s Scepticism of Human Goodness_.—_Life in_ “_Little Hell_.”—_The Cow Cross Mission_.