Gin-shops, or what the English call spirit-vaults, are numerous in the vicinity of these poor streets, and are set off with the magnificence of gilded doorposts, tarnished by contact with the unclean customers who haunt there.  Ragged children come thither with old shaving-mugs, or broken-nosed tea-pots, or any such make-shift receptacle, to get a little poison or madness for their parents, who deserve no better requital at their hands for having engendered them.  Inconceivably sluttish women enter at noonday and stand at the counter among boon-companions of both sexes, stirring up misery and jollity in a bumper together, and quaffing off the mixture with a relish.  As for the men, they lounge there continually, drinking till they are drunken,—­drinking as long as they have a halfpenny left, and then, as it seemed to me, waiting for a sixpenny miracle to be wrought in their pockets, so as to enable them to be drunken again.  Most of these establishments have a significant advertisement of “Beds,” doubtless for the accommodation of their customers in the interval between one intoxication and the next.  I never could find it in my heart, however, utterly to condemn these sad revellers, and should certainly wait till I had some better consolation to offer before depriving them of their dram of gin, though death itself were in the glass; for methought their poor souls needed such fiery stimulant to lift them a little way out of the smothering squalor of both their outward and interior life, giving them glimpses and suggestions, even if bewildering ones, of a spiritual existence that limited their present misery.  The temperance-reformers unquestionably derive their commission from the Divine Beneficence, but have never been taken fully into its counsels.  All may not be lost, though those good men fail.

Pawn-brokers’ establishments, distinguished by the mystic symbol of the three golden balls, were conveniently accessible; though what personal property these wretched people could possess, capable of being estimated in silver or copper, so as to afford a basis for a loan, was a problem that still perplexes me.  Old clothes-men, likewise, dwelt hard by, and hung out ancient garments to dangle in the wind.  There were butchers’ shops, too, of a class adapted to the neighborhood, presenting no such generously fattened carcasses as Englishmen love to gaze at in the market, no stupendous halves of mighty beeves, no dead hogs or muttons ornamented with carved bas-reliefs of fat on their ribs and shoulders, in a peculiarly British style of art,—­not these, but bits and gobbets of lean meat, selvages snipt off from steaks, tough and stringy morsels, bare bones smitten away from joints by the cleaver, tripe, liver, bullocks’ feet, or whatever else was cheapest and divisible into the smallest lots.  I am afraid that even such delicacies came to many of their tables hardly oftener than Christmas.  In the windows of other little shops you saw half a dozen wizened herrings, some