world, where nobody ever goes to bed, but
everybody is eternally sitting up, waiting for
Jack. This exploration was among a
labyrinth of dismal courts and blind alleys, called
Entries, kept in wonderful order by the police,
and in much better order than by the corporation:
the want of gaslight in the most
dangerous and infamous of these places being quite
unworthy of so spirited a town. I need describe
but two or three of the houses in which Jack was
waited for, as specimens of the rest. Many we
attained by noisome passages so profoundly dark
that we felt our way with our hands. Not one
of the whole number we visited, was without its
show of prints and ornamental crockery; the
quantity of the latter set forth on little shelves
and in little cases, in otherwise wretched rooms,
indicating that Mercantile Jack must have an
extraordinary fondness for crockery, to necessitate
so much of that bait in his traps.

Among such garniture, in one front parlour in
the dead of the night, four women were sitting
by a fire. One of them had a male child in her
arms. On a stool among them was a swarthy
youth with a guitar, who had evidently stopped
playing when our footsteps were heard.

"Well! how do you do?" says Mr. Superintendent,
looking about him.

"Pretty well, sir, and hope you gentlemen
are going to treat us ladies, now you have come
to see us."

"Order there!" says Sharpeye.

"None of that!" says Quickear.

Trampfoot, outside, is heard to confide to
himself, "Meggisson's lot this is. And a bad
'un!"

"Well!" says Mr. Superintendent, laying
his hand on the shoulder of the swarthy youth,
"and who's this?"

"Antonio, sir."

"And what does he do here?"

"Come to give us a bit of music. No harm
in that, I suppose?"

"A young foreign sailor?"

"Yes. He's a Spaniard. You're a Spaniard,
aint you, Antonio?"

"Me Spanish."

"And he don't know a word you say, not he,
not if you was to talk to him till doomsday."
(Triumphantly, as if it redounded to the credit
of the house.)

"Will he play something?"

"Oh, yes, if you like. Play something,
Antonio. You aint ashamed to play something;
are you?"

The cracked guitar raises the feeblest ghost
of a tune, and three of the women keep time to
it with their heads, and the fourth with the
child. If Antonio has brought any money in
with him, I am afraid he will never take it out,
and it even strikes me that his jacket and
guitar may be in a bad way. But, the look of
the young man and the tinkling of the instrument
so change the place in a moment to a leaf out of
Don Quixote, that I wonder where his mule is
stabled, until he leaves off.

I am bound to acknowledge (as it tends rather
to my uncommercial confusion), that I occasioned
a difficulty in this establishment, by having taken
the child in my arms. For, on my offering to
restore it to a ferocious joker not unstimulated
by rum, who claimed to be its mother,
that unnatural parent put her hands behind her,
and declined to accept it; backing into the fire-
place, and very shrilly declaring, regardless of
remonstrance from her friends, that she knowed
it to be Law, that whoever took a child from its
mother of his own will, was bound to stick to it.
The uncommercial sense of being in a rather
ridiculous position with the poor little child
beginning to be frightened, was relieved by my
worthy friend and fellow constable, Trampfoot;
who, laying hands on the article as if it were a
Bottle, passed it on to the nearest woman, and
bade her "take hold of that." As we came out,
the Bottle was passed to the ferocious joker, and
they all sat down as before, including Antonio
and the guitar. It was clear that there was no
such thing as a nightcap to this baby's head,
and that even he never went to bed, but was
always kept up—and would grow up, kept up—
waiting for Jack.

Later still in the night, we came (by the court
"where the man was murdered," and by the
other court across the street, into which his body
was dragged) to another parlour in another
Entry, where several people were sitting round
a fire in just the same way. It was a dirty and
offensive place, with some ragged clothes drying
in it; but there was a high shelf over the
enance-door (to be out of the reach of marauding
hands, possibly), with two large white loaves on
it, and a great piece of Cheshire cheese.

"Well!" says Mr. Superintendent, with a
comprehensive look all round. "How do you do?"

"Not much to boast of, sir." From the
curtseying woman of the house. "This is my
good man, sir."

"You are not registered as a common Lodging
House?"

"No, sir."

Sharpeye (in the Move-on tone) puts in the
pertinent inquiry, "Then why ain't you?"

"Ain't got no one here, Mr. Sharpeye,"
reins the woman and my good man together,
"but our own family."

"How many are you in family?"

The woman takes time to count, under
pretence of coughing, and adds, as one scant of
breath, "Seven, sir."

But she has missed one, so Sharpeye, who
knows all about it, says:

"Here's a young man here makes eight, who
ain't of your family?"

"No, Mr. Sharpeye, he's a weekly lodger."

"What does he do for a living?"

The young man here, takes the reply upon
himself, and shortly answers, "Ain't got
nothing to do."

The young man here, is modestly brooding
behind a damp apron pendent from a clothes-line.
As I glance at him I become—but I don't know
why—vaguely reminded of Woolwich, Chatham,
Portsmouth, and Dover. When we get out, my