provided for the very poor and striving, to
discover how they may most easily be
bettered. "Go," said a friend engaged in the
like search, "to this address,"—and he gave
me an address written upon a piece of paper.
"It is copied from a letter that appeared some
time since, in the Times. The proprietor of
those houses called attention to the fact, that
by a few cheap alterations he had been able
to convert them from a state of terrible
corruption into Christian dwellings." Then I
said, "I will go and study this man's secret."

And I went accordingly, upon a glorious
May morning in search of these fortunate
abodes, round the Queen's palace, and through
a long and spacious square odorous with
spring scents from the foliage and flowers.
Drawing-room windows were thrown wide
in many houses, that the dames and damsels
as they sat within might taste the honied
spring; and through a break in the trees I
saw one balcony daintily trimmed with
crimson cushions, over which leant
wedding guests, looking down upon a
carriage an a coachman with white favours.
At the moment when I looked, the street
door opened, and I saw the bride with a
young step cross the threshold of her baby
home. The carriage drove off, and the
wedding guests looked after it, and the maid-
servant at the bed-room window overhead
looked after it, and all the maid-servants at
the door of the next house looked after it,
and I looked after it, and sent after it the
benediction of a passer-by.

Three minutes afterwards I entered the
street in search of which I had come out. The
spring was left behind me then; for all the
flowers of the earth would not have concealed
the filthiness of the vile stink in which I
seemed to have become suddenly enveloped.
Out of the large and pleasant square into
a small and unpleasant one; then out of
that again into a street not very narrow,
with a gin-shop at the corner. The abruptness
of the plunge into what then was to be seen,
and smelt, and felt, filled me with sudden
horror. I stood still. There was a gulf at
no great distance before me, of which I saw
only the top, and might have supposed, had
it been cleaner, that it was a railway cutting.
It cut the street in two; there was more
street beyond, and there were houses and
there were lanes on each side, running along
its brink. Houses and lanes so mean and
desolate, and rotten, that one might reasonably
suppose them to be bred, as men once
said of crocodiles, in all their loathsomeness
from the surrounding filth. Women and
small children with deadly faces, and with
skins and rags discoloured by corruption,
stirred about in a dull way as maggots that
belonged to the unwholesome mass.

The two houses of which I was in search were
close before me, on the edge of the gulf, or
pit, or cutting. They were much larger than
those round about them, stood apart, and had
before them a clean paved court within iron
railings. They did not seem to be rotten, and
there was a silent bird in a cage at a window
near the roof. I went nearer, near enough
to see to the bottom of the little gulf, and
turned away from it bodily sick. There—
under the windows of the improved dwellings
—rolled the thick, black, putrid stream of a
great open sewer. The two houses were
parted from it only by a neat door leading to
further abominations, doubtless, since it was
officially ticketed and labelled as the property
of the Commissioners of Sewers. There was
no need to go into the houses. I desired no
further knowledge, but I did learn more.

Members of the skating club, morning
bathers, ladies galloping so gracefully in
Rotten Row, or enjoying the fresh breeze
from the water when you take your airing
in the Ring, this filthy place of which I
have been speaking is upon the banks of
the river Serpentine! It is the same river
that adorns Kensington Gardens and
pollutes  the slums of Chelsea, as it is the
same race of man and woman all the land
through. The Serpentine rises, I believe,
somewhere about Hampstead, and great
pains are properly taken with it in the
parks, where it is spread out into a tolerably
wholesome piece of ornamental water. Even
there, however, it sometimes falls into
disfavour, and men exclaim against it for a want
of wholesome cleanliness. Afterwards it flows
among the poor, becomes a sewer quite as
foul as the Fleet Ditch, and no man cares.
Under and about good houses it flows unseen,
carefully concealed by stout arches from eyes
and nose. From these it escapes to pour the
whole volley of its poison among the dwellings
of the miserable poor; for them no
arches are built, from them no filth is kept,
no ugliness is hidden; they are quiet; they
bear all without remonstrance, and have all
to bear. Every dead dog seen in the
Serpentine in Hyde Park has been duly
denounced in the journals by some public-
spirited father of a family, who saw it in his
walks. But there are few whose walks take
them among the very wretched, and until I
was myself half suffocated by it, I never
knew, for I had never heard or read, of the
poor man's Serpentine, that slips its filth
along to a foul outlet in the Thames near
Chelsea Hospital.

Death and despair do many thereof sup,
And secret poison through their inner parts;
Th' eternal bale of heavy wounded hearts.

There are not many hundred persons in
this country whose pulses would not beat
rather more quickly than usual, who would
not feel some tingling in their cheeks, and be
excited by strong impulse to speech, and
more than speech, on behalf of men, women,
and children subdued to quietness in the
endurance of such homes as are suggested here
with all their griefs, if they were only now and