with which the waitresses (quite new to the
art a month before) discharged their duty, was
as agreeable to see, as the neat smartness with
which they wore their dress and had dressed
their hair.

If I seldom saw better waiting, so I certainly
never ate better meat, potatoes, or pudding.
And the soup was an honest and stout soup,
with rice and barley in it, and "little matters
for the teeth to touch," as had been
observed to me by my friend below stairs already
quoted. The dinner-service, too, was neither
conspicuously hideous for High Art nor for
Low Art, but was of a pleasant and pure appearance.
Concerning the viands and their cookery,
one last remark. I dined at my club in Pall-
Mall aforesaid, a few days afterwards, for
exactly twelve times the money, and not half as
well.

The company thickened after one o'clock
struck, and changed pretty quickly. Although
experience of the place had been so recently
attainable, and although there was still
considerable curiosity out in the street and about
the entrance, the general tone was as good as
could be, and the customers fell easily into the
ways of the place. It was clear to me,
however, that they were there to have what they
paid for, and to be on an independent footing.
To the best of my judgment, they might be
patronised out of the building in a month. With
judicious visiting, and by dint of being
questioned, read to, and talked at, they might even be
got rid of (for the next quarter of a century) in
half the time.

This disinterested and wise movement is
fraught with so many wholesome changes in the
lives of the working people, and with so much
good in the way of overcoming that suspicion
which our own unconscious impertinence has
engendered, that it is scarcely gracious to criticise
details as yet; the rather, because it is
indisputable that the managers of the
Whitechapel establishment most thoroughly feel that
they are upon their honour with the customers,
as to the minutest points of administration.
But, although the American stoves cannot roast,
they can surely boil one kind of meat as well
as another, and need not always circumscribe
their boiling talents within the limits of ham
and beef. The most enthusiastic admirer of
those substantials, would probably not object
to occasional inconstancy in respect of pork
and mutton: or, especially in cold weather, to
a little innocent trifling with Irish stews, meat
pies, and toads in holes. Another drawback
on the Whitechapel establishment, is the absence
of beer. Regarded merely as a question of
policy, it is very impolitic, as having a tendency
to send the working men to the public-house,
where gin is reported to be sold. But, there is
a much higher ground on which this absence of
beer is objectionable. It expresses distrust of
the working man. It is a fragment of that
old mantle of patronage in which so many
estimable Thugs, so darkly wandering up and down
the moral world, are sworn to muffle him. Good
beer is a good thing for him, he says, and he likes
it; the Depôt could give it him good, and he
now gets it bad. Why does the Depôt not give
it him good? Because he would get drunk.
Why does the Depôt not let him have a pint
with his dinner, which would not make him
drunk? Because he might have had another pint,
or another two pints, before he came. Now, this
distrust is an affront, is exceedingly inconsistent
with the confidence the managers express in
their hand-bills, and is a timid stopping-short
upon the straight highway. It is unjust and
unreasonable, also. It is unjust, because it
punishes the sober man for the vice of the
drunken man. It is unreasonable, because any
one at all experienced in such things knows that
the drunken workman does not get drunk where
he goes to eat and drink, but where he goes to
drink—expressly to drink. To suppose that
the working man cannot state this question to
himself quite as plainly as I state it here, is
to suppose that he is a baby, and is again to
tell him in the old wearisome condescending
patronising way that he must be goody-poody,
and do as he is toldy-poldy, and not be a manny-
panny or a voter-poter, but fold his handy-pandys,
and be a childy-pildy.

I found, from the accounts of the WhitechapelSelf-Supporting Cooking Depôt, that
every article sold in it, even at the prices I
have quoted, yields a certain small profit!
Individual speculators are of course already in the
field, and are of course already appropriating
the name. The classes for whose benefit the
real depôts are designed, will distinguish
between the two kinds of enterprise.

TYBURNIA OF OLD.

ON a certain Sunday, September, 1750, about
eleven o'clock at night, a man of fashion, sitting
in his own dining-room, No. 5, Arlington-street,
London, was alarmed by a loud cry of "Stop
thief!" A highwayman had just stopped a post-
chaise in Piccadilly, not fifty yards off, and,
being pursued, had ridden over and almost
killed a watchman.

About the same date, or a little earlier, a
London antiquarian describes Oxford-street as
"a deep, hollow road, full of sloughs, with
here and there a ragged house, the lurking-
place of cut-throats; insomuch," says he, "that
I never was taken that way by night in my
hackney-coach to a worthy uncle's, who gave
me lodgings in his house in George-street, but
I went in dread the whole way." In 1710, the
Duke of Newcastle had bought Tyburn-road,
as it was then called, and named it after his son-
in-law, Edward Harley, Earl of Oxford. About
1718 it was probably first publicly known by
its present name. Before the suburban roads
were well lit and well watched, highway
robberies were perpetual. The Old Bailey Session
Papers abound in instances. Let us select a
few, to explain the character of the crimes,
and the way in which the robberies were