Across the way is a beer-shop, kept by a Hebrew, the bar-maids and all being Hebrew. On the one side of the bar is a small dining room; back of that a kitchen, and from the bar-room is a flight of stairs. Follow your guide, who in this instance was an American Hebrew, and you find yourself in a low room just the size of the bar below, and a curious scene presents itself. These rooms, and there are scores of them in Petticoat Lane, contain on an average any number of millions of pounds that you choose to say. I could say that there were a hundred millions of wealth in each one, and perhaps wouldn't be very much out of the way, but as I desire to be accurate, I will not. If there is anything I detest, it is exaggeration. I hope to distinguish myself by being the first tourist who adhered strictly to the naked truth. These rooms are diamond marts. In them all the diamonds that deck out royalty and the wives of patent medicine men, gamblers, negro minstrels, and other people who are not royal, are first handled. To these dingy dens in the very heart of the worst quarter of the worst city in the world, comes the diamond merchant, and here he meets the broker who deals with the manufacturer in the city. Here all the diamonds of London are first bought and sold. One looks at it with amazement. Enter a young Jew with the preternaturally sharp features that distinguish the race. All the merchants, and there may be a dozen, each sitting at his little table, hail him, and all in the language that the new comer speaks the best. The Hebrew speaks all languages, and all of them well. (Facts crowd upon me so fast that it is difficult to keep to my subject.) The young fellow unbuttons his coat, and then the top buttons of his vest, and takes from an inner pocket a long leather pocket-book, which he opens carefully. There are disclosed a dozen papers folded like an apothecary's package, and he opens them. Your eyes dance as you see the contents. Diamonds! I never dreamed there were so many in the world. Each paper contains a handful of all sizes and qualities, cut and uncut, of all colors and shades known to the diamond, and the ancient Jews at the tables take these papers and examine critically the different sparklers, going over the lot as the Western farmer would his cattle. With a little steel instrument he separates this one from his fellows and puts it under a glass, and screws his eye into the stone, and then little tiny scales, which would turn under the weight of a sunbeam, are brought into requisition, and then would come more chaffering and bargaining than would suffice to buy and sell an empire.