Glancing over my map of London, and retracing the course of our peregrinations, I find, with some complacency, that we have not, after all, left many parts of the metropolis unexplored. We have been to Camberwell and to Hyde Park Corner; to Pentonville and to London Bridge; to Billingsgate and to Euston Square. It is true, that we have not yet penetrated to the interior of Buckingham Palace, or the condemned cell at Newgate, nor do I think that I shall assume the part of the Boy Jones or a visiting magistrate for your amusement; but we have been “behind the scenes” of more places than theatres since this clock was first wound up. It is not without regret now, that I linger over and dally with my few remaining hours. They have been very pleasant ones for me. I shall miss the printer’s boy (for, be it known, I am about to abandon literature and go into trade, though I have not yet settled the precise business—corn, or coals, or commission agency). I shall miss, beyond aught else, the daily deluge of letters from anonymous correspondents—praising, blaming, complaining, or inquiring, but all, I am glad to say, very appreciative readers of my shiftless writings. But we have come to the complexion of midnight, and the hour must be described. It is fraught with meaning for London. You know that in poetical parlance midnight is the time when church-yards yawn (they had need to be weary now, for the Board of Health won’t allow them to receive any occupants _intra muros_), and graves give up their dead. And there be other grave-yards in London town—yards where no tombstones or brick vaults are—that at midnight yawn and send forth ghosts to haunt the city. A new life begins for London at midnight. Strange shapes appear of men and women who have lain a-bed all the day and evening, or have remained torpid in holes and corners. They come out arrayed in strange and fantastic garments, and in glaringly gaslit rooms screech and gabble in wild revelry. The street corners are beset by night prowlers. Phantoms arrayed in satin and lace flit upon the sight. The devil puts a diamond ring on his taloned finger, sticks a pin in his shirt, and takes his walks abroad. It is a stranger sight than even the painter Raffet imagined in his picture of Napoleon’s midnight review, and it is, I think, a much better thing to be at home and in bed, than wandering about and peeping into the mysteries of this unholy London night life. I know this book (to my sorrow) well; have conned its grim pages, and studied its unwholesome lore, attentively. But I am not about to make you a too-recondite participant in my knowledge. Were it not that the appointed hours were meted out to me, and that from one of the hours—midnight—the Haymarket is inseparable, the wicked street should find no place here; but I must be faithful to my trust, and the bad thoroughfare must be in part described.