umbrella at the street stall. The flowers are the
morsels of vegetables cast out as too bad for
even Shoreditch nutriment. The carriages are
costermongers' trucks; for music here are the
cries of suffering children, or curses and
vituperation—which the echoes are charged with
night and day. Are these slouching sulky
distorted creatures, who lurk and lower along the
sordid thoroughfares, the same animals as the
gallants of the other part of the town, the men
of upright carriage and free and open looks,
cantering in Rotten-row, or lounging in faultless
clothes at the entrance to that luxurious place?
Are the ladies who lie back in their open
carriages, as if their sofas were put upon wheels, or
who rein with powerful curb their hardly
restrained horses, flesh and blood like to the
masculine and bony hags who scream at their
children as they drag them from the gutter, and
provoke their husbands to increased wrath as
they stagger from the public-house?

Yet it does not take an hour to get from the
sight of the first condition to the sight of the
second. At one o'clock in the afternoon you
may be listening to pleasant and prosperous
sounds, inhaling sweet odours, and seeing around
you only suggestions of wealth and happiness,
and at two you may plant yourself before a rag
and bone shop, with a print in the window of
Justice tightly bandaged, weighing a pound of
dripping in her scales, and giving the highest
price for it compatible with a reasonable profit.
In less than one short hour, you can pass into
the regions of intensest squalor, where every
sense is offended, just as in the other
neighbourhood every one of the five senses was
comforted and pleased.

Is this great contrast one to which many
persons subject themselves? Are there those who,
of their own free will, pass from the first scene
to the second? Nay, are there those whose
lot is cast in the pleasant land, and who leave it
to go into the land of pain and horror? There
are those who make the pilgrimage who make
it from choice, who cannot enjoy their own
comforts while they know of such unutterable
misery, who start on a great mission from the
west to the east, and who come back leaving
behind them goodly work accomplished.

To record what has been done by one such
person is the main object of this paper.

Most people in this town know something of
the wretchedness that prevails in those great
outlying districts which border the city of
London on its eastern side. Some of us have
been obliged to go into one of these neighbourhoods
on some business matter; some of us have
gone to see what such places are like. In these
days of railway travelling, many travellers starting
on a pleasure-trip have an Asmodeus glimpse
of courts and alleys, and houses and rooms,
which they would otherwise never see, and, as
the train drags slowly along at starting, get
opportunities of beholding a little garret-life the
memory of which miles of steaming among
meadows and trees will not dispel. Now to all
those who have passed through, or journeyed
above, a poor neighbourhood, and who have
thought sorrowfully of the misery around them,
it will be a great comfort to know that such
misery may be alleviated in a substantial and
enduring manner, and that the frightful condition
in which the poor exist is not an inevitable
and irremediable evil, but, on the contrary, one
to which it is perfectly simple and easy to apply
a remedy, if we will but exert ourselves in the
right direction.

In one of the remotest and most impoverished
parts of the remote and impoverished district
known generically as Bethnal-green, there exists
a certain piece of ground, which, together with
the buildings that stand upon it, goes by the
name of Columbia-square. I believe it used to
be called Nova Scotia Gardens. Columbia-
square is very little known. The pedestrian
who would find it out must keep his eyes about
him, and ask his way of all sorts of people,
while he who would approach it in a cab had
best hire the vehicle by the hour, as the driver
will get through a considerable amount of
distance in wandering up and down and round and
round the Bethnal-green streets before he
discovers Columbia-square.

The place is distinct enough from all the
surrounding neighbourhood when you do get within
range of it, and would infallibly attract your
notice at once, even if you had previously heard
nothing about it, and were not in search of it.

The surrounding neighbourhood is very
dwarfish in height; Columbia-square is
composed of houses of a considerable elevation.
The surrounding neighbourhood is very dirty;
Columbia-square is spotlessly clean. The
surrounding neighbourhood is stuffy and close;
Columbia-square is airy and open. The
surrounding neighbourhood is highly flavoured as
to odour; Columbia-square is as sweet (as the
saying goes) as a nut.

It was a happy day for that miserable district
of Bethnal-green, and indirectly, no doubt, for
other of the poorer London neighbourhoods,
when the abject wretchedness of the inhabitants
became known to one whose profound sympathy
with human suffering is united to a rare ability
to relieve it, and a wonderful discretion in the
manner of relief. We are used to find the
name of Miss Burdett Coutts associated with
acts of mercy. Her praise is sung in every
apartment of these Bethnal-green houses which
she has built, and no written panegyric, be it
ever so strongly expressed, could equal the silent
testimony borne by the neat convenient rooms,
by the bearing of the inhabitants whose lives are
altered by the self-respect which the place
engenders, by the wholesome faces of the children
living in good air and in clean and decent human
habitations.

Columbia-square is a four-sided enclosure of
considerable size. The houses are arranged in
four blocks, each of which is so large as to
contain on an average about five-and-forty sets of
apartments, or complete tenements. There is
an open court-yard in the middle of the
parallelogram which these houses form, and free