revived me so, whispered in my ear that it was
nearly three.

"And how long was I there?" I got out at
last.

"Twenty-five hours!"

HOME, SWEET HOME.

PYE-STREET, Westminster, is five minutes'
walk from the House of Commons. Passing the
monument to the brave Westminster lads who
have fallen in defence of their country, and
leaving on your left the dread establishment
where our youth are passed or plucked by the
Civil Service Commissioners, you turn down a
narrow thoroughfare opposite a great hotel—the
pleasant peculiarity of which hotel is that pretty
girls are always to be seen at its coffee-room
windows—and promptly lose yourself in a
labyrinth of foul and unsavoury streets. Towering
above the miserable houses in front and on each
side of you are stately edifices rapidly approaching
completion; and while the constant click
of mallet and chisel testify to the continual
extension of building, they serve to increase your
bewilderment and lessen your chances of finding
the place you seek. This, if you attempt
exploration without a guide. To-day, however, we
are accompanied by a tall member of the A division,
who knows Pye-street and its approaches
well, and who tersely says of the former, " A
pretty sort o' drum for you to visit, gentlemen."

It is now six o'clock in the evening of Monday
the 12th of March, and the Right Honourable
the Chancellor of the Exchequer has been
eloquently advocating for more than an hour the
political claims of the working man. The crowd
we have just left outside Westminster Hall is
composed of people who have failed in obtaining
seats in the strangers' gallery; the news-boys
are already shouting " Second hedition, Mr.
Gladstone on Reform;" the mysterious wires
are spreading north, east, west, and south,
arguments in favour of extending the franchise; and
we all read next day that the right honourable
gentleman resumed his seat at ten minutes past
seven, after declaring, amid the loud cheers of an
excited House, that " more than your gold and
your silver, more than your fleets and your
armies, is the attachment of the people to
throne and laws, at once the strength, the glory,
and the safety of the land."

At the moment of this peroration being
uttered, we are in a back-yard in Pye-street,
testing for ourselves the surroundings of those
whose loyal attachment is so highly prized
and so properly vaunted. We have spent the
time during which the working man's political
rights have been gracefully dwelt upon, in seeing
how far his social claims are practically
considered, what his home is like, what the air he
breathes, what the water he drinks. The
following description is, for obvious reasons, made
general, but its details are minutely accurate,
and one or other of them apply to the numerous
poor homes we visited that bright evening. This
back-yard, then, is one of many, and the squalid
tenements of Pye-street are duplicated all over
London. In St. Dragon's in the South, in
Clerkenwell, in Bethnal-green, in the yards and
courts off Drury-lane, may be found the sights
we shudder at to-day. Indeed, so minutely does
the present experience coincide with that
previously acquired, that it is difficult to realise
the locality we are in as one we have not
explored previously.* Take this yard, for
example. Unpaved, with its black slimy soil
sticking up between the round and broken bits
of stone which form its flooring; a panless closet
in one corner, from which a pestilential stench
proceeds; an open dust-heap in another;
between these, the water-butt for seven families.
Of course this butt is uncovered; of course the
wood of which it is composed is in an advanced
stage of decay; of course the exhalations from
the soil-bestrewed yard, from filthy closet, and
from dust-heap, are attracted by the water, and
take form and shape in that rainbow-hued scum
we see glistening on its surface. Peering into
the butt, we see, at its bottom, broken tobacco-
pipes, cabbage-stalks, bits of broken tile and
pottery-ware, and an old shoe. On tapping its side
with a walking-cane, the rotten wood breaks, and
with long strings of green slime like seaweed,
comes off at the slightest touch. " No, it is never
cleaned out, for to tell yer the truth, gentlemen,
my old man began to clean it one day, and blessed
if he didn't scrape a hole right out of it, where
yer see the rag a-pluggin' of it now; and
since then we've let it alone, for the water
don't taste so very bad, and it ain't much
of it we drinks!" The speaker is a fat coarse
slattern, the wife of a bricklayer's labourer, not
yet returned from work, who did the honours of
her wretched room and plague-creating yard
with a certain unction, as if impressed with the
novelty of conversing with a member of the
metropolitan force on amicable terms.

* See EVERY MAN'S POISON, vol. xiv., p. 372.

"Dust-heap never removed! Lord bless yer,
no; they don't never remove it without we gives
them somethin' for theirselves. Parish pays the
dustmen! Yes, sir, and so I've heard myself; but
that there heap before you is as bad as it is to-day,
because me and a neighbour fell out as to whose
turn it was to stand the dustman a drop o' beer!"

Decomposed fish-heads, decayed vegetable
matter, cinders—what in another sphere would
be called kitchen refuse—and the scourings of
the pig-tub, made up the foul mass before us.
Here and there, where the rays of the setting
sun fell upon it—for the evening was bright
and clear, as those in waiting outside
Westminster Hall will remember—it sent a sluggish
putrescent vapour up, to mingle with the already
vitiated air, and insidiously force its way through
broken panes, into rooms where whole families
lay stewing. Might we go up-stairs?
Certainly we might, if we wouldn't mind treading
softly over the two broken ones, and keeping
to the left, where we saw the hole. A
few moments' stumbling and we are in the