The Margaret Street in question is an apparently derelict thoroughfare, opening into Great Portland Street.  Immemorial dust is upon its pavements, and a profound silence broods over its vacant roadway.  The blinds of its houses are mostly down, and, where the blackness of some window suggests a dark interior, no face appears to reassure us in our doubt of humanity within.  It may be that somewhen in the past the entire population of this street set out on a boating party up the river, and was overset by steam launches, and so never returned, or perchance it has all been locked up for a long term of imprisonment—­though the houses seem almost too respectable for that; or the glamour of the Sleeping Beauty is upon it all.  Certainly we saw the figure of a porter in an attitude of repose in the little glass lodge in the museum doorway.  He may have been asleep.  But we feared to touch him—­and indeed slipped very stealthily by him—­lest he should suddenly crumble into dust.

And so to the Museum and its wonders.  This Parkes Museum is a kind of armoury of hygiene, a place full of apparatus for being healthy—­in brief, a museum of sanitary science.  To that large and growing class of people who take no thought of anything but what they eat and what they drink, and wherewithal they should be clothed, it should prove intensely interesting.  Apart from the difficulty of approach we cannot understand how it is so neglected by an intelligent public.  You can see germicides and a model convict prison, Pentonville cells in miniature, statistical diagrams and drain pipes—­if only there was a little more about heredity, it would be exactly the kind of thing that is popular in literature now, as literature goes.  And yet excepting ourselves and the sleeping porter—­if he was sleeping—­and the indistinct and motionless outline, visible through a glass door, of a human body sitting over a book, there was not a suggestion or memory of living humanity about the place.

The exhibits of food are especially remarkable.  We cleaned the glass case with our sleeves and peered at the most appetising revelations.  There are dozens of little bottles hermetically sealed, containing such curios as a sample of “Bacon Common (Gammon) Uncooked,” and then the same cooked—­it looked no nicer cooked—­Irish sausage, pork sausage, black pudding, Welsh mutton, and all kinds of rare and exquisite feeding.  There are ever so many cases of this kind of thing.  We saw, for instance, further along, several good specimens of the common oyster shell (Ostrea edulis), cockle shells, and whelks, both “almonds” and “whites,” and then came breadstuffs.  The breadstuffs are particularly impressive, of a grey, scientific aspect, a hard, hoary antiquity.  We always knew that stale bread was good for one, but yet the Parkes Museum startled us with the antique pattern it recommended.  There was a muffin, too, identified and labelled, but without any Latin name,