The extensive scale on which these places are established, and the ostentatious manner in which the business of even the smallest among them is divided into branches, is most amusing. A handsome plate of ground glass in one door directs you “To the Counting-house;” another to the “Bottle Department;” a third, to the “Wholesale Department;” a fourth, to “The Wine Promenade,” and so forth, until we are in daily expectation of meeting with a “Brandy Bell,” or a “Whiskey Entrance.” Then ingenuity is exhausted in devising attractive titles for the different descriptions of gin; and the dram-drinking portion of the community, as they gaze upon the gigantic white and black announcements, which are only to be equalled in size by the figures beneath them, are left in a state of pleasing hesitation between “The Cream of the Valley,” “The Out and Out,” “The No Mistake,” “The Good for Mixing,” “The real knock-me-down,” “The celebrated Butter Gin,” “The regular Flare-up,” and a dozen other equally inviting and wholesome _liqueurs_. Although places of this description are to be met with in every second street, they are invariably numerous and splendid in precise proportion to the dirt and poverty of the surrounding neighborhood. The gin-shops in and near Drury-lane, Holborn, St. Giles', Covent Garden, and Clare-market, are the handsomest in London—there is more filth and squalid misery near those great thorough-fares than in any part of this mighty city. We will endeavor to sketch the bar of a large gin-shop, and its ordinary customers, for the edification of such of our readers as may not have had opportunities of observing such scenes; and on the chance of finding one well suited to our purpose, we will make for Drurylane, through the narrow streets and dirty courts which divide it from Oxford-street, and that classical spot adjoining the brewery at the bottom of Tottenham-court-road, best known to the initiated as the “Rookery.” The filthy and miserable appearance of this part of London can hardly be imagined by those (and there are many such) who have not witnessed it. Wretched houses, with broken windows patched with rags and paper, every room let out to a different family, and in many instances to two, or even three: fruit and “sweet stuff” manufacturers in the cellars; barbers and red-herring venders in the front parlors; cobblers in the back; a bird-fancier in the first floor, three families on the second; starvation in the attics; Irishmen in the passage; a “musician” in the front kitchen, and a char-woman and five hungry children in the back one—filth every where—a gutter before the houses and a drain behind them—clothes drying at the windows, slops emptying from the ditto; girls of fourteen or fifteen, with matted hair, walking about bare-footed, and in old white great coats, almost their only covering; boys of all ages, in coats of all sizes, and no