Among other places, we went, a little past midnight, into one of the Casual Wards, which were so graphically described, some years ago, in an English magazine, by a gentleman who, as a pretended tramp, went in on a reporting expedition.  We walked through an avenue of poor tired sleeping forms, all lying flat on the floor, and not one of them raised a head to look at us as we moved thoughtfully up the aisle of sorrowful humanity.  I think we counted sixty or seventy prostrate beings, who had come in for a night’s shelter, and had lain down worn out with fatigue and hunger.  There was one pale young face to which I whispered Dickens’s attention, and he stood over it with a look of sympathizing interest not to be easily forgotten.  There was much ghastly comicality mingled with the horror in several of the places we visited on those two nights.  We were standing in a room half filled with people of both sexes, whom the police accompanying us knew to be thieves.  Many of these abandoned persons had served out their terms in jail or prison, and would probably be again sentenced under the law.  They were all silent and sullen as we entered the room, until an old woman spoke up with a strong, beery voice:  “Good evening, gentlemen.  We are all wery poor, but strictly honest.”  At which cheerful apocryphal statement, all the inmates of the room burst into boisterous laughter, and began pelting the imaginative female with epithets uncomplimentary and unsavory.  Dickens’s quick eye never for a moment ceased to study all these scenes of vice and gloom, and he told me afterwards that, bad as the whole thing was, it had improved infinitely since he first began to study character in those regions of crime and woe.

Between eleven and twelve o’clock on one of the evenings I have mentioned we were taken by Dickens’s favorite Detective W——­ into a sort of lock-up house, where persons are brought from the streets who have been engaged in brawls, or detected in the act of thieving, or who have, in short, committed any offence against the laws.  Here they are examined for commitment by a sort of presiding officer, who sits all night for that purpose.  We looked into some of the cells, and found them nearly filled with wretched-looking objects who had been brought in that night.  To this establishment are also brought lost children who are picked up in the streets by the police,—­children who have wandered away from their homes, and are not old enough to tell the magistrate where they live.  It was well on toward morning, and we were sitting in conversation with one of the officers, when the ponderous door opened and one of these small wanderers was brought in.  She was the queerest little figure I ever beheld, and she walked in, holding the police officer by the hand as solemnly and as quietly if she were attending her own obsequies.  She was between four and five years old, and had on what was evidently her mother’s bonnet,—­an enormous production, resembling