with the mud of the street outdirtied in his clothes—­lounges, lowering and brutal, at the street corner and the gin-shop door; the public disgrace of his country, the unheeded warning of social troubles that are yet to come.  Here, the loud self-assertion of Modern Progress—­which has reformed so much in manners, and altered so little in men—­meets the flat contradiction that scatters its pretensions to the winds.  Here, while the national prosperity feasts, like another Belshazzar, on the spectacle of its own magnificence, is the Writing on the Wall, which warns the monarch, Money, that his glory is weighed in the balance, and his power found wanting.

Situated in such a neighborhood as this, Vauxhall Walk gains by comparison, and establishes claims to respectability which no impartial observation can fail to recognize.  A large proportion of the Walk is still composed of private houses.  In the scattered situations where shops appear, those shops are not besieged by the crowds of more populous thoroughfares.  Commerce is not turbulent, nor is the public consumer besieged by loud invitations to “buy.”  Bird-fanciers have sought the congenial tranquillity of the scene; and pigeons coo, and canaries twitter, in Vauxhall Walk.  Second-hand carts and cabs, bedsteads of a certain age, detached carriage-wheels for those who may want one to make up a set, are all to be found here in the same repository.  One tributary stream, in the great flood of gas which illuminates London, tracks its parent source to Works established in this locality.  Here the followers of John Wesley have set up a temple, built before the period of Methodist conversion to the principles of architectural religion.  And here—­most striking object of all—­on the site where thousands of lights once sparkled; where sweet sounds of music made night tuneful till morning dawned; where the beauty and fashion of London feasted and danced through the summer seasons of a century—­spreads, at this day, an awful wilderness of mud and rubbish; the deserted dead body of Vauxhall Gardens mouldering in the open air.

On the same day when Captain Wragge completed the last entry in his Chronicle of Events, a woman appeared at the window of one of the houses in Vauxhall Walk, and removed from the glass a printed paper which had been wafered to it announcing that Apartments were to be let.  The apartments consisted of two rooms on the first floor.  They had just been taken for a week certain by two ladies who had paid in advance—­those two ladies being Magdalen and Mrs. Wragge.

As soon as the mistress of the house had left the room, Magdalen walked to the window, and cautiously looked out from it at the row of buildings opposite.  They were of superior pretensions in size and appearance to the other houses in the Walk:  the date at which they had been erected was inscribed on one of them, and was stated to be the year 1759.  They stood back from the pavement, separated from it by