Well, I left that to pursue my medical studies, and it so happened the shortest way between the school which I attended and the library of the College of Surgeons, where my spare hours were largely spent, lay through certain courts and alleys, Vinegar Yard and others, which are now nothing like what they were then.  Nobody would have found robbing me a profitable employment in those days, and I used to walk through these wretched dens without let or hindrance.  Alleys nine or ten feet wide, I suppose, with tall houses full of squalid drunken men and women, and the pavement strewed with still more squalid children.  The place of air was taken by a steam of filthy exhalations; and the only relief to the general dull apathy was a roar of words—­filthy and brutal beyond imagination—­between the closed-packed neighbours, occasionally ending in a general row.  All this almost within hearing of the traffic of the Strand, within easy reach of the wealth and plenty of the city.

I used to wonder sometimes why these people did not sally forth in mass and get a few hours’ eating and drinking and plunder to their hearts’ content, before the police could stop and hang a few of them.  But the poor wretches had not the heart even for that.  As a slight, wiry Liverpool detective once said to me when I asked him how it was he managed to deal with such hulking ruffians as we were among, “Lord bless you, sir, drink and disease leave nothing in them.”

[This early contact with the sternest facts of the social problem impressed him profoundly.  And though not actively employed in what is generally called “philanthropy,” still he did his part, hopefully but soberly, not only to throw light on the true issues and to strip away make-believe from them, but also to bring knowledge to the working classes, and to institute machinery by which capacity should be caught and led to a position where it might be useful instead of dangerous to social order.

After some time, however, he left Mr. Chandler to join his second brother-in-law (John Godwin Scott.), who had set up in the north of London, and to whom he was duly apprenticed, as his brother James had been before him.  This change gave him more time and opportunity to pursue his medical education.  He attended lectures at the Sydenham College, and, as has been seen, began to prepare for the matriculation examination of the University of London.  At the Sydenham College he met with no little success, winning, besides certificates of merit in other departments, a prize—­his first prize—­for botany.  His vivid recollections, given below, of this entry into the scientific arena are taken from a journal he kept for his fiancee during his absence from Sydney on the cruises of the “Rattlesnake.”]

On board H.M.S.  “Rattlesnake,” Christmas 1847.