TILLING THE DEVIL'S ACRE.

THERE is a little road with a blind ending
in the neighbourhood of Clapham Rise, which
set out with the design of travelling to Brixton,
but stopped suddenly after it had crossed
and cut in half a certain nursery garden.
The road is called Wellington Road, and it
lies close by the Bedford Road, within a
stone's throw of The Bedford Arms. The
garden—in which, when we visited it on one
warm evening in May, we saw many a young
plant drooping under the day's heat watered
by young thieves, who were themselves only
beginning to revive under the influence of
careful gardening—the garden is described
thus on a board displayed in the adjoining
thoroughfare. The description is headed with
a Latin motto, which means what the garden
means—Work the Restorer of Virtue.

LABOR VIRTUTES RESTITUTOR
WELLINGTON AND BEDFORD NURSERIES.
NURSERYMAN A. WALKER AND FLORIST.
Flower Stands Furnished. Bouquets may be had
at all Seasons. Gardens Laid Out and attended to.
Carriage Entrance, Wellington Road.

In this nursery garden the rose opens
noiselessly under the hand of the cracksman;
the coarse fingers of the garotter clasp the
neck of the hyacinth to its stick, and the
light touches of the pickpocket delicately
tend the lilies of the valley. Andrew Walker,
who for sixteen years worked as a city
missionary in a foul corner of London, known in
his time as the Devil's Acre,* has for the last
two or three years been tilling in this garden
the devil's acre; and, by giving work, wages,
and human care and trust, to youths willing
to drag themselves up into light out of the
gloomy depths of crime, he has produced
more blossom and fruit than is usually to be
had from hothouses and garden borders. As
the youths were watering the masses of young
plants that drooped their leaves under the
heat of a spring sun, they were but doing
as they were done by. Even to the eye of
the flesh, there is a peculiar droop of a young
thief's head, that may be taken as an emblem
of the moral drought by which, if not a
man will help him, he must die. It was still
to be seen in some of these young gardeners;
but there was evident in all the sense of a
reviving influence. Labour in open air had
taken haggardness out of their cheeks, and
honest living had put healthy looks into their
eyes.

* See Household Words, Volume the First, page 297.

But who is Mr. Andrew Walker? Let us
see the gardener before we pass into the
garden. Mr. Walker is a Scotchman, who
was born in the village of Earlstown, on
Leaderwater, and was brought up to the
trade of gardening. He first came to London
about twenty years ago as gardener to some
gentleman or lady; and, before he had been
long in town, happened to lose his way one
day in a labyrinth of filthy lanes and alleys
west of Westminster Abbey. They were
then worse than they now are, lying, as they
did, beside the Abbey walls, and forming one
of the worst nests of filth and crime in the
metropolis. They covered a patch of ground
commonly known as the Devil's Acre, for the
wickedness it bore. They were owned by the
Dean and Chapter as a church estate.
Shocked deeply by what he saw when lost
for an hour among these lanes—in which so
many are lost from the hour of their birth
to the hour of their burial—Mr. Walker
dwelt for days upon the new thoughts forced
into his mind. What were the most glorious
flowers in the universe to the divine blossom
destroyed when children become, soul and
body, loathsome, and when sins and sorrows
settle like a cloud of locusts on a thicket of
doomed women and men? By Heaven's help,
he said, I will give my life up to the hope
that I may prosper in a better gardening than
this with tulips and with mignonnette. He
had heard of London city missionaries, and
applied to be enrolled among their number.
He was so enrolled, and for sixteen years
worked as a city missionary, having that
dread acre at Westminster assigned to him
as his ground. During the sixteen years, he
witnessed gradual improvement, and was, of
course, active in laying the foundations of
local ragged schools and reformatories. What
kind of material he had to work upon it will
be well briefly to show, rather by facts than,
comments.

Among eight hundred social pariahs with
whom he came into contact, there were some