duration of the cottage is, of course, not always perfectly strict; for, if the dwellings are in a thickly-built-up portion of the town, and there is a good prospect of finding steady occupants for them, while the ground rent is high, the contractors do a little something to keep the cottages inhabitable after the expiration of the forty years.  They never do anything more, however, than is absolutely unavoidable, and the dwellings so repaired are the worst of all.  Occasionally when an epidemic threatens, the otherwise sleepy conscience of the sanitary police is a little stirred, raids are made into the working-men’s districts, whole rows of cellars and cottages are closed, as happened in the case of several lanes near Oldham Road; but this does not last long:  the condemned cottages soon find occupants again, the owners are much better off by letting them, and the sanitary police won’t come again so soon.  These east and north-east sides of Manchester are the only ones on which the bourgeoisie has not built, because ten or eleven months of the year the west and south-west wind drives the smoke of all the factories hither, and that the working-people alone may breathe.

Southward from Great Ancoats Street, lies a great, straggling, working-men’s quarter, a hilly, barren stretch of land, occupied by detached, irregularly built rows of houses or squares, between these, empty building lots, uneven, clayey, without grass and scarcely passable in wet weather.  The cottages are all filthy and old, and recall the New Town to mind.  The stretch cut through by the Birmingham railway is the most thickly built-up and the worst.  Here flows the Medlock with countless windings through a valley, which is, in places, on a level with the valley of the Irk.  Along both sides of the stream, which is coal black, stagnant and foul, stretches a broad belt of factories and working-men’s dwellings, the latter all in the worst condition.  The bank is chiefly declivitous and is built over to the water’s edge, just as we saw along the Irk; while the houses are equally bad, whether built on the Manchester side or in Ardwick, Chorlton, or Hulme.  But the most horrible spot (if I should describe all the separate spots in detail I should never come to the end) lies on the Manchester side, immediately south-west of Oxford Road, and is known as Little Ireland.  In a rather deep hole, in a curve of the Medlock and surrounded on all four sides by tall factories and high embankments, covered with buildings, stand two groups of about two hundred cottages, built chiefly back to back, in which live about four thousand human beings, most of them Irish.  The cottages are old, dirty, and of the smallest sort, the streets uneven, fallen into ruts and in part without drains or pavement; masses of refuse, offal and sickening filth lie among standing pools in all directions; the atmosphere is poisoned by the effluvia from these, and laden and darkened by the smoke of a dozen tall