Where the long lane from St. Giles’s to the Strand divides the many-branching slums; where flares the gas over coarse scraps of meat in cheap butchers’ shops; where brokers pile up motley heaps of second-hand wares—from fishing-rods and bird-cages to flat-irons and blankets; from cornet-à-pistons and “Family Encyclopædias” to corkscrews and fowling-pieces; where linen-drapers are invaded by poorly-clad women and girls, demanding penn’orths of needles, ha’porths of buttons, and farthingworths of thread; where jean stays flap against the door jambs, and “men’s stout hose” gleam gaunt in the shop-windows; where grimy dames sit in coal and potato-sheds, and Jew clothesmen wrestle for the custom of passengers who don’t want to buy anything; where little dens, reeking with the odours of fried fish, sausages, and baked potatoes, or steaming with reminders of à-la-mode beef and hot eel soup, offer suppers, cheap and nasty, to the poor in pocket; where, in low coffee-shops, newspapers a fortnight old, with coffee-cup rings on them, suggest an intellectual pabulum, combined with bodily refreshment; where gaping public-houses receive or disgorge their crowds of tattered topers; where “general shops” are packed to overflowing with heterogeneous odds and ends—soap, candles, Bath brick, tobacco, Dutch cheese, red herrings, firewood, black lead, streaky bacon, brown sugar, birch brooms, lucifer matches, tops, marbles, hoops, brandy balls, packets of cocoa, steel pens, cheap periodicals, Everton toffy, and penny canes; where on each side, peeping down each narrow thoroughfare, you see a repetition only of these scenes of poverty and misery; where you have to elbow and jostle your way through a teeming, ragged, ill-favoured, shrieking, fighting population—by oyster-stalls and costermongers’ barrows—by orange-women and organ-grinders—by flower-girls and match-sellers—by hulking labourers and brandy-faced viragos, squabbling at tavern doors—by innumerable children in every phase of weazened, hungry, semi-nakedness, who pullulate at every corner, and seem cast up on the pavement like pebbles on the sea-shore. Here, at last, we find the hostelry of the three golden balls, where the capitalist, whom men familiarly term “my uncle,” lends money on the security of plate, jewellery, linen, wearing apparel, furniture, bedding, books—upon everything, in fact, that is not in itself of so perishable a nature as to warrant the probability of its rotting upon my uncle’s shelves.