something to tell him. The keeper bent down
and listened; but the head was sinking gently,
lower and yet lower, upon the young breast;
and the spirit of the little Capet had sped to
where the wicked cease to trouble and the
weary find repose.

UNDERGROUND LONDON.
CHAPTER III.

BLUE-BOOKS on sewers, like most blue-books,
are very solid instructive volumes, not half as
much appreciated as they deserve to be, and too
often made the easy butt of mechanical and
uninquiring ridicule. Able, friendly sewer engineers
and obliging secretaries are always crammed to
overflowing with special information, and are
always ready to be tapped to enlighten the
public. Reports, pamphlets, letters, hints—
cyclopædias that are learned upon cloacæ in
general, and enthusiastic about the Roman
Cloaca Maxima in particular, with a dozen
other similar documents and publications—are
not to be despised; but, in dealing with
underground London as if determined to know
something about it, there is nothing like a long,
dark, sloppy, muddy survey.

On applying to the proper authorities, I was
obligingly told that they had not the slightest
objection to gratify what they evidently thought
a very singular taste. I was even asked to
name my sewer. They could favour me with an
extensive choice. I might choose from about
one hundred and seventy miles of legally
constituted "main" sewers, running through some
hundred and eighty outlets into the Thames;
or, if I liked to trespass upon "district" and
"private" sewers, they could put me through
about sixteen hundred miles of such
underground tunnels. They had blood-sewers—a
delicate article—running underneath meat
markets, like Newport-market, where you could
wade in the vital fluid of sheep and oxen; they
had boiling sewers, fed by sugar-bakeries, where
the steam forced its way through the gratings
in the roadway like the vapour from the hot
springs in Iceland, and where the sewer-cleansers
get Turkish baths at the expense of the rate-
payers. They had sewers of various orders of
construction—egg-shaped, barrel-shaped, arched,
and almost square; and they had sewers of different
degrees of repulsiveness, such as those where
manufacturing chemists and soap and candle-
makers most do congregate. They had open rural
sewers that were fruitful in watercresses; and
closed town sewers whose roofs are thickly
clustered with what our scientific friends call
"edible fungi." The choice was so varied that
it was a long time before I could make up my
mind, and I decided, at last, upon exploring the
King's Scholars' Pond Sewer, which commences
in the Finchley New Road, and ends in the
Thames a little above Vauxhall-bridge.

If the literary executors of the late Mr. Leigh
Hunt had not cut the ground from under me in
the title of a book just published, I might
possibly have called this chapter A Saunter
through the West-End. We have all our
different ways of looking at London. The late
Mr. Crofton Croker had his way, as he has
shown in his Walk from London to Fulham;
and I have mine.

Sewer-cleansers are a class of workmen who
seldom come prominently before the public.
They have never made any particular noise in
the world, although they receive in London
every year about five and twenty thousand
pounds sterling of public money. Their wages,
individually, may average a pound a week.
They have never distinguished themselves by
producing any remarkable "self-made men;"
any Lord Chancellors, or even Lord Mayors;
and have never attempted, as a class, to "raise
themselves in the social scale." They are good,
honest, hard-working underground labourers,
who often meet extreme danger in the shape of
foul gases, and sometimes die at their posts—as
we saw the other day in the Fleet-lane sewer.

Some half-dozen of these men, with a foreman
of flushers, attended me on the day I selected
for my underground survey. They were not lean
yellow men, with backs bent by much stooping,
and hollow coughs produced by breathing much
foul air. Their appearance was robust; and, as
I measured bulk with one or two of them, I had
no reason to be proud of any superior training.

There seems to be only one costume for
underground or underwater work, and the armour
necessary for sewer-inspecting will do for lobster-
catching on the coast, or for descending in a sea
diving-bell. The thick worsted stockings coming
up to the waist, the heavy long greased
boots of the seven league character, the loose
blue shirt, and the fan-tailed hat, may be very
hot and stifling to wear, but no sewer inspector
is considered properly fortified without them.

There is a fatal fascination about sewers;
and, whenever a trap-door side entrance is
opened, a crowd is sure to gather about the
spot. The entrance to the King's Scholars'
Pond Main Sewer, that I decided to go down
by, is close to the cab-stand at St. John's-wood
Chapel, and twenty cabmen were so much
interested in seeing me descend with my guides,
that the offer of a fare would have been
resented as an annoying interruption.

"Rather him than me; eh, Bill?" said one.

"That beats cab-drivin'," said another.

The side entrance is a square brick-built shaft,
having a few iron rings driven into two of its
sides. These rings form the steps by which
you ascend and descend, putting your foot on
one as you seize another. I felt like a bear
in the pit at the Zoological Gardens, as I
descended in this fashion; and I dare say many
respectable members of parochial-sewer-
committees have gone through the same labour, and
have experienced the same feeling. Before the
iron trap-door over us was closed by the two
men left to follow our course above ground, I
caught a glimpse of a butcher's boy looking down
the shaft, with his mouth wide open. When the
daylight was shut out, a closed lantern was put
in my hand. I was led stooping along a short