dart given in its place, and the tormented
cripple must needs lean upon its poisoned
edge. There is no meat, but there is gin;
there is no breathing space, but there is
sewer poison in abundance; and if there is not
much air, there is no stint in its loathsomeness.
There is little reasonable knowledge,
but there is every provocative to vice. Men
cannot live blank lives. Now let us attempt
to show what sort of compulsion they are
suffering in Turpin's corner.

Kent Street, with all its wretchedness,
serves as the High Street to a little city of
the wretched. Lanes and alleys form a mesh
about it—Sweeps' Alley, Amicable Alley,
Little Britain, Falstaff's Yard—most of them
blind lanes. One side of the city of sorrow,
borders upon Bermondsey, from which it is
parted by a ditch, once altogether open, but
now covered from the sight, and open only to
the smell. Bermondsey refuses to have
intercourse with the men of Saint Stephen's, Kent
Street, and so completely blocks them out
that there is to be found only a single bridle-
road by which the border between the two
districts can be crossed. In this quarter of the
town there are still a few rank patches of soil
left open for the use of speculative builders,
and some rows of houses—two-roomed or
four-roomed—have been lately built. Two-
roomed houses at rents of three shillings or
three and sixpence a-week—seem to be in
most request, and those are twice as large as
any tenant can afford. Almost every room
contains a distinct family. There were, two
years ago, eight hundred and fourteen houses
in the district or parish of Saint Stephen's,
and as ten persons to a house is a low
estimate of the swarm that seeks under each
roof a shelter, we have eight thousand people
pulling at the heart-strings and, as far as
nature permits at the purse-strings, of the
incumbent and his wife. These are a kindly
gentleman and lady who, after labouring with
success among the poor of Bethnal Green,
were, eleven years ago, promoted to work in
the yet more hopeless field of benevolent
exertion at Saint Stephen's, Southwark. For
these eleven years they have worked utterly
unaided. There is not a soul in Kent Street
by whom sixpence can be spared; neighbours
have much want to relieve in their own
parishes. Except when it became famous for
the devastation made in it by cholera, the
greater public has known nothing at all
about this place. Because a parish of this
sort can yield nothing itself towards the
maintenance of schools, or of a curate, it is
cut off from all aid out of the funds of church
societies.

It is hard to conceive what must be
suffered by a sensitive gentleman and lady
during eleven years of daily contact with
supreme distress and daily single-handed
struggle out of small means to help thousands
in a battle against overwhelming want.
The gaunt face of famine stares at them in
winter time from every doorway. During the
past winter there was starvation—not
metaphorical, but literal, life-consuming hunger—
to be fought with; life could be saved, and
was saved, even by the mere expenditure of
shillings. "We lay down sometimes heart-
sick," the minister's wife said to us, "What
we could do was so little—what we wanted
to do was so much."

They might feel not heart-sick only. When
we visited the district only for a few hours,
though not untrained to bear what is revolting
in the homes of the neglected poor, we came
away bodily sick. The Thames bank, in summer,
at low water, and near a sewer opening,
may be fouler,—for want of experience, we
cannot tell,—but on firm soil in London we
have never taken into our mouths air so foul as
that which we smelt and tasted in the
neighbourhood of Kent Street, on a dull, cool and
dry day in early Spring.

We called upon the master of a little shop
within the district,—a sensible man, who sits
helpless in his chair, because his lower limbs
are paralysed. That is the result to him of
thirty-three years faithful service in the Southwark
sewers. He was in trust as one of seven
foremen until a considerable reduction of the
staff took place, at the time when he was first
becoming helpless; and use has been made
since that time of his long experience, but he
has looked in vain to Commissioners of Sewers,
or to the new Board of Works, for the small
pension, to which he is fairly entitled, for a
life's energies consumed in their employment.
One crippled, both advanced in years, he and
his wife keep shop, and their stock-in-trade
consisted, when we saw it, of a handful of
sugar candy, a few brandy-balls, four sugar-
plums contained in pickle-bottles, three
herrings and a half, five dip candles and a
half (the division of the herrings and the
candles has sad meaning in it); lastly, about
a quart of parched peas, in a broken plate.
By the trade thus indicated, they subsist. At
how slight a sacrifice of means could a great
public body pay its debt to a poor worn-out
servant of this character. The rich can
commonly make good their claims for any
compensation or retiring pension to which they
may fairly, or unfairly, be entitled. The poor
man only sits and grumbles through the
winter, in his corner by the chilly grate,
with here and there a neighbour, helpless as
himself, ready to listen to his grievance, and
pity his distress. As for our friend, he does
get something for his services; his pension is
the palsy in his legs. This man, learned in
sewers, had little to tell us of the sewerage of
his own district, about which he had good
reason to be inquisitive. Honestly speaking,
there is none, except that under Kent-street
itself—which lies low, and we think is under
the high-water mark—a sewer runs. All
other houses of the district have a nominal
and irregular drainage of four-inch pipes laid
by the builders close under the surface of the