Still I asked for more. I wished to see one of
the oldest working hands on the sewer establishment;
a hoary mudlark who had been seasoned
by nearly half a century's training, and who
might fairly be regarded as a hermit of the
sewers. My ideal of such a man was that of a
sewer-flusher, who, by long familiarity with little
else than the black underground streams of
London, had come to regard the whole universe
as one vast pool of sewage. No man who would
have felt astonished at seeing the English Channel
bricked over by contractors, and turned into
a main sewer; or who would have thought it
singular to live over an outfall flood of sewage as
large as Niagara, would have come up to my ideal.
With some little difficulty, an old workman was
found, who was not surprised to hear that I had
been down various sewers, and took a deep
interest in them. Nothing appeared to him more
natural than that people should like to go
down sewers, and to talk about them for hours
together.

Our interview began in a kind of underground
cell, side-entrance, or bower, where a man is
often put to watch the tide; but it ended in
a district engineer's office. The walls were
covered with maps and plans; the tables had
many specimen brick bats upon them, all labelled
and numbered; there were many pieces of pipe-
drain on the floor; many curious fossils on the
mantelshelf; and a row of champagne-bottles
filled with specimens of river sewage. There
was method, business, and science, in all this,
but the degraded condition of the champagne-
bottles struck me as approaching desecration.

"Them's not quite the things to squench
your thirst," said my companion, the old sewer
workman, alluding to the bottles.

"Not exactly," I said; "the man who could
so treat old wine-bottles must have been a
savage teetotaller."

My companion, encouraged from time to time
by my questions, began to unfold his fifty years'
experiences. He was a stout, healthy-looking
old man, with a face not unlike a large red
potato. He was good-tempered, and proud of
his special knowledge; but not presuming. In
this he differed from one or two other workmen
whom I had met, who seemed to wish me to
understand that they, and they alone, knew all
about the London sewerage system. His
language was frequently rather misty; but a very
little grammar will go a long way in the sewers,
and working men have something else to think
of beyond aspirating the letter H.

"They was like warrens," he said, alluding to
the old south-side sewers; ''you never see such
shores (sewers). Some on 'em was open; some
was shut; an' some was covered over with
wooden platforms, so's to make the gardings all
the larger. Some o' the shores was made o' wood,
spesh'ly about Roderide; an' at S'uth'ark the
people used to dip their pails in 'em for water.
They made holes in 'em, so's to get at the water
when the tide was up, an' I've seen 'em dippin'
often nigh Backley and Puckins's."

"Did you ever meet with any accident," I
asked, "during the long time you have worked
in the sewers?"

"Oh yes," he said; " I've bin knocked down
a dozen times by the gas; spesh'ly nigh the dead
ends o' shores, an' I've bin burnt over an' over
agen. When your light goes out, you may know
summat is wrong, but the less you stirs about
the muck the better. I've carried a man as 'as
bin knocked down, nigh a mile on my lines
[loins] in the old days afore we could get to the
man-hole. It's pretty stuff, too, the gas, if you
can only lay on your back when it goes ' whish,'
an' see it runnin' all a-fire along the crown o'
the arch."

"I dare say," I said; " but sewers are quite
bad enough to walk in, without such illuminations."

"Shores is all right," he returned, rather
pettishly; " it's the people as uses 'em that don't
know how to treat 'em. There's the naptcha-
makers, an' those picklin' yards where they
soaks iron in some stuff to make it tough;
they're nice places, they are, an' nice messes
they makes the shores in, at times. Then there's
can'le an' soap-manyfact'rers, which sends out
a licker, that strong, that it will even decay i'on
an' brickwork. Then there's gas-tar-manyfact'rers
agen. We're 'bliged to go to all o' these
people afore we goes down the shore, an' ask
'em to 'old 'ard. If we didn't do that, there'd
be more on us killed than is."

"I suppose," I said—of course with a view
of getting information—" the sewers you go up
are often very small?"

"Some is two foot shores," he replied, " an'
they're tighteners; others is three foot barrels;
an' others is larger."

"Did you ever hear of any murder being
committed in the sewers?" I asked, not being
willing to give up the chance of a romantic story
without a struggle.

"There was one open shore," he said, "that
some o' the foremen used to call 'old Grinacre,'
in the S'uth'ark districk, but that's bin covered
over many years."

"What about that?" I asked, eagerly.

"Well," he said, "it used to bother us a good
deal. One mornin', when the tide was all right,
we goes down to work, an' picks up a leg!"

"A human leg?" I asked.

"Yes," he said, "all that, an' not a wooden
one neither. Another night, when the tide was
all right agen, we goes down, an' we finds
another leg!"

"Another human leg?" I asked, in astonishment.

"Ev'ry inch on it," he returned, "an' that ain't
all. Another time we goes into the same shore,
an' we finds a arm, an' another time we goes
down, an' we finds another arm."

It seemed very annoying to me that my
companion was compelled to sneeze and cough at
this point of his story for about five minutes.

"What did you do?" I asked.

"Oh," he said, "the foreman put 'em down
in his book, an' they went afore the Board, an'
it was a long time afore the Board could make