"I know nothing more exhilirating than to be suddenly ushered in the night into a populous quarter of a great city. My recollection readily conjures up the impressions made upon me under similar circumstances in entering Paris, Madrid, Brussels, Milan, or gay and lively Naples. The lower classes, with their good humor, their quaint drollery and sprightliness, there offer the most agreeable objects of contemplation. Here, however, there was in the corresponding classes nothing pleasing, or even picturesque. All seemed in search of food, of the means of intemperance, and of gratifying low and brutal passions. The idea of amusement had evidently no place. The streets swarmed with abandoned women, filthy in their dress, open, brutal, and indecent in their advances. In the places of the guitar, the serenade, the musical cries of chesnut-women, lemonade-sellers, and watermen, the sounds here were harsh and grating: uttered in words ill pronounced and nasally prolonged, or in an unintelligible and discordant slang which I no longer recognized as belonging to my own language. In the place of skilful musicians performing the favorite airs of Mozart or Rossini, or the witty colloquies of the sententious Punchinello, the poor were invited, in the nasal twang of clamorous mountebanks to amuse themselves by a sight of the latest cases of seduction, murder, suicide, and hanging, represented in the shadows of the camera obscura. The dark masses of dwelling-houses had a confined, narrow, gloomy, and lugubrious aspect. They were of brick, without window-sills of marble or other colored stone; unpainted, and unenlivened by blinds. They were closely shut, and the glimpses of cheerfulness and domestic comfort {194} exhibited in our streets were here unseen. All the shops were open to the weather: Many of them having the whole front removed, and gas-lights blazing and streaming like great torches, rather than with the puny and flickering illumination seen in ours. The articles were completely exposed to view at the side of the street; clothing, provisions, crockery, hardware; whatever is necessary to the wants of man. The druggists, with their variegated vases, as with us, cast the Iris hues of their nauseous mixtures into the street. Sellers of cheap goods exposed them in the windows, with their price labelled. The butchers hung out beef, pork, sausages, and enormous coarse sheep, in a nearly whole state, with sometimes the price affixed to the inferior portions, in order that the poor might judge whether the price they had received for their day's labor, would compass a meal of meat; or whether they should seek a diet more suited to their means, of a neighboring potato-merchant: or whether to turn in despair, as many of the most wretched seemed to do, to accept the flattering invitation of the magnificent gin-palace at the corner. It was the most splendid