“Paid to Thomas Wright for 67 load of soyle laid on the graves in Tothill Fields, wherein 1200 Scotch prisoners, taken at the ffight at Worcester, were buried, and for other paines taken with his teame of horsse about amending the Sanctuary Highway when General Ireton was buried. XXXS.” How many of the remaining two thousand eight hundred ever got home again? Chance once threw into my hands a tract which showed the hard treatment and the barbarities to which Monmouth’s convicts in Barbadoes were subjected: most of these were men of respectable family, to whom money might be sent for their exemption from work in the fields, or even for their redemption. But these other poor fellows were absolutely friendless and penniless. And they were going to the Guinea Coast, the Gold Coast, the white man’s grave! One hopes that the mortality on their arrival was swifter and more extensive than even the mortality in Tothill Fields, because death was certainly the best thing that could happen to them. When these papers first appeared I received a letter of expostulation from a reader. He said that the streets of Westminster were not all so disreputable as I seemed to think. He said: “Westminster only became a slum within this hundred years. The old Westminster workhouse had been the mansion of Sir John Pye. Sir Francis Burdett was born in Orchard Street, and Admiral Kempenfeldt who went down in the _Royal George_ had his house there, and not so very long ago a pear tree bloomed annually in his garden. The father of Henry Boys, organist of St. John’s, about 1830 to 1840, was a bullion worker and carried on his business for many years and up to the thirties in Great St. Anne’s Lane. My grandmother was born, 1770, in Peter Street, at the corner of Duck Lane. She told me that all that neighbourhood was very respectable in her girlhood, Duck Lane being the only exception. She attributed the downfall of the locality to the cheap houses that were built at that time in New Peter Street. Towards the end of the century there was only one shop in Strutton Ground: all the rest being public-houses. My mother was born in 1802 in Marlborough House, Peter Street, then the premises of the Cudbear Company. She used to recall Brown’s Gardens in her young days, that were between St. Peter Street and the Horseferry Road. They were nursery gardens. Palmer’s village was a collection of houses for workmen, built about the beginning of this century or the end of last, between Emanuel Hospital and Brewer’s Green, and accessible through an archway leading from the latter.”