to be a butcher's near Smithfield-bars, who had
missed him five months, all which time he had
been in the common sewer, and was improved
in price from ten shillings to two guineas." A
prodigal son, missing for this period, would not
have increased in value.

Gay, in his Trivia, has had a fling at the old
Fleet Ditch:

If where Fleet Ditch with muddy current flows,
You chance to roam; where oyster-tubs in rows
Are ranged beside the posts; there stay thy haste,
And with the savoury dish indulge thy taste
The damsel's knife the gaping shell commands,
While the salt liquor streams between her hands.

Of course, the oyster-shells were thrown into the
"slow-creeping" stream, either by the
stallkeeper or her customers.

Pope has added his mite to Fleet Ditch satire
and history, in the Dunciad:

This labour past, by Bridewell all descend
(As morning prayer and flagellation end)
To where Fleet Ditch with disemboguing streams
Rolls its large tribute of dead dogs to Thames.

Swift, with his usual bold felicity in dealing
with such subjects, has outdone all his brother
poets in his City Shower:

Now from all parts the swelling kennels flow,
And bear their trophies with them as they go;
Filth of all hues and odours seem to tell
What street they sailed from by their sight and
smell.
They, as each torrent drives its rapid force,
From Smithfield to St. Pulchre's shape their course,
And in huge confluence joined at Snowhill ridge,
Fall from the Conduit prone to Holborn Bridge;
Sweepings from butcher's stalls. . . .
Drowned puppies, stinking sprats, all drenched in
mud,
Dead cats and turnip-tops, come tumbling down
the flood.

The two old bridges which formerly spanned
the Ditch at Holborn and Fleet-street, at the
junction witli Ludgate, are built into and
form part of the present great sewer. Its
length, within the City, is now about three-
quarters of a mile, but it extends for miles
beyond the City boundary, and drains an area of
four thousand two hundred and twenty acres.
Some few houses, at different parts of its course,
still hang over the black uncovered stream, like
those traditional bygone dens of Field-lane,
which have been the source of a thousand stories
in the romance of crime. Jonathan Wild, Jack
Sheppard, and other similar criminals, are said
to have haunted this spot; and, along with
accounts of fat boars, city refuse, and coarse
heroic couplets, we have many traditions of
robbery and murder. Some of the houses
overhanging the Fleet Ditch in the last century had
trap-doors opening over the stream, through
which many victims are said to have been
thrust, as well as many heaps of muck and
ashes. The Fleet certainly rushed down to
the river, in times of flood; and bodies picked
up floating backwards and forwards with the
tide, would, no doubt, have been taken ashore
to be owned—if not owned, would have
been buried by the parish with a Bow-street
record of "found drowned." So far, the
machinery seems to have been well adapted for
commission of such crimes, and we may therefore
allow that a certain small per-centage of
existing stories are founded upon fact.

It is a relief to turn from these black
records of one of the oldest and largest of
the northern main sewers, to stories such as
are told of the less famous Effra. This great
southern sewer was once a small river, which,
rising in the Norwood hills, flowed down in a
winding course to Kennington, and then wound
through South Lambeth to the Thames, near
where Vauxhall-bridge now stands. "Forty
years ago," says a contemporary writer,
"nightingales in great numbers made their home in
the sequestered portions of the Effra's banks,
and flocks of larks might have been seen sweeping
over Rush Common. The river was then
wider than at present, with a current racing
along faster than a man could walk. Although
its channel was very deep, a day or two of heavy
rain invariably caused an overflow, which laid
South Lambeth, Kennington, and the lower
portions of Brixton, under water."

The abbots of Merton had lands given them
for the especial purpose of repairing the bridge
over the Effra, at the point where Kennington
church now stands; and Brixton was a
happy hunting-ground, well stocked with game,
where Queen Elizabeth used to disport herself,
during her visits to Lord Norris. A local tradition
exists that the strong-minded queen once
came up the river Effra in her barge to visit Sir
Walter Raleigh, at old Raleigh House, which
still stands on the hill. Looking at the
partly open, partly closed, black stream, now
known as The Wash, or Effra main sewer,
and thinking of the frilled fulness which
characterised the Elizabethan style of dress, it is
difficult to believe that the former could have
ever been broad enough to admit the latter.
There, however, is the tradition, firmly rooted,
like many other traditions, in the popular faith.

Most of the old water-courses can adduce like
stories of what they were in their younger days,
when they were honoured as rivers, and not
degraded into sewers. It must not, however, be
inferred from this that our sewerage system,
our drainage plans, and our sanitary theories,
are things of yesterday, based solely upon the
well advertised civilisation of the last twenty
years. As early as the year 1290, the monks of
Whitefriars complained to parliament about the
nuisance of the Fleet Brook. Their case was,
that putrid exhalations of the thick stream
overcame the frankincense burnt at the altar
during the hours of divine service. At a
parliament held in 1307, Henry Lacy, Earl of
Lincoln, also complained, "that whereas in
times past the river Fleet had been of such
depth and breadth, that, ten or twelve ships
with merchandise were wont to come to Fleet-
bridge, and some of them to Old Borne-bridge,
now, the same course, by the filth of the
tanners, and such others, and by the raising of