This was many years since, and as at the time I published a detailed account of the visit, I may be excused from more than briefly alluding to it here. It was at a thieves’ raffle, held at a public-house in one of the lowest and worst parts of Westminster. I was young in the field of exploration then, and from all that I had heard and read made up my mind for something very terrible and desperate. I pictured to myself a band of rollicking desperadoes, swaggering and insolent, with plenty of money to pay for bottles of brandy and egg-flip unlimited, and plenty of bragging discourse of the doughty deeds of the past, and of their cold-blooded and desperate intentions for the future. Likewise, my expectations of hope and fear included a rich treat in the shape of vocalization. It was one thing to hear play-actors on the stage, in their tame and feeble delineations of the ancient game of “high Toby,” and of the redoubtable doings of the Knights of the Road, spout such soul-thrilling effusions as “Nix my Dolly Pals,” and “Claude Duval,” but what must it be to listen to the same bold staves out of the mouths of real “roaring boys,” some of them, possibly, the descendants of the very heroes who rode “up Holborn Hill in a cart,” and who could not well hear the good words the attendant chaplain was uttering because of the noisy exchange of boisterous “chaff” taking place between the short-pipe smoking driver, whose cart-seat was the doomed man’s coffin, and the gleeful mob that had made holiday to see the fun! But in all this I was dismally disappointed. I had procured a ticket for the raffle from a friendly police-inspector (goodness only knows how he came possessed of them, but he had quite a collection of similar tickets in his pocket-book), and, disguised for the occasion, I entered the dirty little dram shop, and exhibited my credential to the landlord at the bar. So far the business was promising. The said landlord was as ill-looking a villain as could be desired. He had a broken nose and a wooden leg, both of which deformities were doubtless symptomatic of the furious brawls in which he occasionally engaged with his ugly customers. As I entered he was engaged in low-whispered discourse with three ruffians who might have been brothers of his in a similar way of business, but bankrupt, and gone to the dogs. As I advanced to the bar the four cropped heads laid together in iniquity, separated suddenly, and the landlord affected a look of innocence, and hummed a harmless tune in a way that was quite melodramatic.