the great central emporium. A boundary
roughly marked out by Bermondsey,
Rotherhithe, Deptford, and the Kent Road will
include the market-garden region, to which
our tour has taken us; there are here a
few pleasant spots to meet the eye of the
railway travellers aloft, as a small compensation
for the doleful odours nearer town. The
rows of houses hereabout are struggling in a
neutral ground between town and country.
We have Blue Anchor Road and Princes
Road, Grange Road and Spa Road, Willow
Walk and Page's Walk, all trying to put in a
countryfied look, but all terribly near the
tanpits; Willow Walk has lost its willows, and
has got leather and tan-turf instead. But
giving the district all the benefit of such fresh
air scenes as it still presents, we must
characterize this market-garden vicinity as a fifth
link in our Bermondsey chain.

Now, however, we are about to plunge into
Bermondsey proper—that strange region,
which has more to do with leather and wool
than all the rest of the metropolis besides.
It was said a few years ago, that a circle one
mile in diameter, having its centre at the spot
where the Abbey once stood, will include
within its limits most of the tanners, the
curriers, the fell-mongers, the wool-staplers,
the leather-factors, the leather-dressers, the
leather-dyers, the parchment-makers, and the
glue-makers, for which this district is so
remarkable. There is scarcely a street, a road,
a lane into which we can turn without seeing
evidences of one or other of these occupations.
One narrow road, leading from the Grange
Road to the Kent Road, is particularly
distinguishable for the number of
leather-factories on either side; some time-worn and
mean, others newly and skilfully erected.
Another street, known as Long Lane, and
lying westward of the church, exhibits nearly
twenty distinct establishments, where skins or
hides undergo some of the many processes to
which they are subjected. Even the public-
houses give note of these peculiarities, by the
signs chosen for them, such as the Woolpack,
the Fellmongers' Arms, Simon the Tanner,
and others of like import.

The chief change observable since the
above was written is the substitution of
large new factories for some of the dingy,
tumble-down, old ones; but it cannot be
said that modern chemistry has yet done
much to sweeten the processes, or the places
where they are conducted, or the garments
of those employed.

Look around, and see how these various
trades depend one upon another; how they
give to the Bermondsey chain a number of
links which we can no longer attempt to
register. Starting with the undoubted fact
(let it have arisen how it may) that
Bermondsey presents more tanning and
leather-dressing than any other spot in England,
or perhaps in the world, we find other
undoubted facts accumulate under our hand
in curious and very diverse ways. The sheep
yields skin fitted for thin leather and parchment;
and hence comes employment for the
fellmonger, the leather-dyer, the parchment-maker,
and others. The ox and the horse
yield hides suitable for stout leather; and
hence the labours of the skin-merchant, the
tanner, the currier, and the leather-factor.
But the English sheep-skins reach Bermondsey
with the wool on; and from this arises a
living for the wool-agent, the wool-stapler,
the flock mattrass-maker, and the hat-maker.
The ox and horse-hides, too, are brought to
market with the hair on; and this hair gives
a busy activity to the hair-merchant, the
horsehair-maker, the hair-felt-maker, and so
forth. Oxen and horses, sheep and goats, all
have scraps and odds and ends of gelatinous
matter about their hides or skins, which cannot
be made into leather; and hence does the
glue-maker derive a valuable store of materials.
The spent bark, when all its tanning
property is driven out of it, has still a power
of yielding a smouldering heat; and hence
the maker of tan-turf, or "good burning
turf," obtains his supply of materials. Thus
it is that all those traders and manufacturers,
rich and poor, congregate at Bermondsey,
each one using up what the others leave.

You must not "walk in silk attire" in
Bermondsey; put on thick boots, and
accompany us to the Leather Market, suitably
placed in the very heart of the tanneries. A
butcher, buying a calf or a sheep at Smithfield,
buys it skin and all; and whether he slaughters
at home, or at famed Newgate or Leadenhall,
the coat is still his property. He places it at
the disposal of a skin salesman, whose rattling,
springless cart, is one of the most intolerably
noisy of London noises; the salesman conveys
it, with numerous other brother-and-sister
skins, to the skin-and-leather market at
Bermondsey, and here it is bought by the
fellmonger.

The skin salesman is simply a broker
or factor; he acts for the butcher who sells
and the fellmonger who buys, and receives
a small commission for his trouble. This
market is really one which might frown upon
certain markets much better known and
more talked of in London; the leather people
subscribed among them a joint-stock of fifty
thousand pounds, about twenty years ago, with
which they built a market and warehouses, not
unworthy of a visit from those who live on
the north side of the Thames. In the open
market the skin salesman acts as broker
between the butcher and the fellmongers, for
the sale of the skins; whereas, in the warehouses,
leather-factors act between the tanners
and the dealers for the sale of leather. The
skin salesmen rent certain bays and square
compartments of pavement in the open market,
where they transact their business. In a
bright July day, with the thermometer at one
hundred and ten degrees in the sun, a visitor
had better contrive to have his handkerchief