introduced to suggest that the writer must be one
of the persons whom I addressed, while
conducting her inquiries. If Mrs. Lecount takes the
business in hand, and lays a trap for me—I
decline her tempting invitation, by becoming
totally ignorant of the whole affair the instant
any second person appears in it. Let the end
come as it may, here I am ready to profit by it:
here I am, facing both ways, with perfect ease and
security—a moral agriculturalist, with his eye on
two crops at once, and his swindler's sickle ready
for any emergency.

For the next week to come, the newspaper will
be more interesting to me than ever. I wonder
which side I shall eventually belong to?

THE THIRD SCENE.

VAUXHALL WALK, LAMBETH.

CHAPTER I.

THE old Archiepiscopal Palace of Lambeth, on
the southern bank of the Thames—with its
Bishop's Walk and Garden, and its terrace
fronting the river—is an architectural relic of the
London of former times, precious to all lovers of
the picturesque, in the utilitarian London of the
present day. Southward of this venerable structure
lies the street labyrinth of Lambeth; and
nearly mid-way in that part of the maze of houses
which is placed nearest to the river, runs the
dingy double row of buildings, now, as in former
days, known by the name of Vauxhall Walk.

The network of dismal streets stretching over
the surrounding neighbourhood, contains a
population, for the most part of the poorer order.
In the thoroughfares where shops abound, the
sordid struggle with poverty shows itself
unreservedly on the filthy pavement; gathers its
forces through the week; and, strengthening to a
tumult on Saturday night, sees the Sunday morning
dawn in murky gaslight. Miserable women,
whose faces never smile, haunt the butchers'
shops in such London localities as these, with
relics of the men's wages saved from the public-
house, clutched fast in their hands, with eyes that
devour the meat they dare not buy, with eager
fingers that touch it covetously, as the fingers of
their richer sisters touch a precious stone. In
this district, as in other districts remote from
the wealthy quarters of the metropolis, the
hideous London vagabond—with the filth of the
street outmatched in his speech, with the mud of
the street outdirtied in his clothes—lounges,
lowering and brutal, at the street corner and the
gin-shop door; the public disgrace of his country,
the unheeded warning of social troubles that are
yet to come. Here, the loud self-assertion of
Modern Progress—which has reformed so much
in manners, and altered so little in men—meets
the flat contradiction that scatters its pretensions
to the winds. Here, while the national prosperity
feasts, like another Belshazzar, on the
spectacle of its own magnificence, is the Writing
on the Wall, which warns the monarch, Money,
that his glory is weighed in the balance, and his
power found wanting.

Situated in such a neighbourhood as this,
Vauxhall Walk gains by comparison, and establishes
claims to respectability which no impartial
observation can fail to recognise. A large
proportion of the Walk is still composed of private
houses. In the scattered situations where shops
appear, those shops are not besieged by the
crowds of more populous thoroughfares.
Commerce is not turbulent, nor is the public
consumer besieged by loud invitations to "buy."
Bird-fanciers have sought the congenial
tranquillity of the scene; and pigeons coo, and
canaries twitter, in Vauxhall Walk. Second-
hand carts and cabs, bedsteads of a certain age,
detached carriage-wheels for those who may want
one to make up a set, are all to be found here in
the same repository. One tributary stream in
the great flood of gas which illuminates London,
tracks its parent source to Works established in
this locality. Here, the followers of John
Wesley have set up a temple, built before the
period of Methodist conversion to the principles
of architectural religion. And here—most
striking object of all—on the site where thousands
of lights once sparkled; where sweet sounds of
music made night tuneful till morning dawned;
where the beauty and fashion of London feasted
and danced through the summer seasons of a
century—spreads, at this day, an awful wilderness
of mud and rubbish; the deserted dead body of
Vauxhall Gardens mouldering in the open air.

On the same day when Captain Wragge
completed the last entry in his Chronicle of Events, a
woman appeared at the window of one of the
houses in Vauxhall Walk, and removed from the
glass a printed paper which had been wafered
to it, announcing that Apartments were to be let.
The apartments consisted of two rooms on the
first floor. They had just been taken for a week
certain, by two ladies who had paid in advance
—those two ladies being Magdalen and Mrs.
Wragge.

As soon as the mistress of the house had left
the room, Magdalen walked to the window, and
cautiously looked out from it at the row of
buildings opposite. They were of superior
pretensions in size and appearance to the other
houses in the Walk: the date at which they had
been erected was inscribed on one of them, and
was stated to be the year 1759. They stood back
from the pavement, separated from it by little
strips of garden-ground. This peculiarity of
position, added to the breadth of the roadway
interposing between them and the smaller houses
opposite, made it impossible for Magdalen to see
the numbers on the doors, or to observe more of
any one who might come to the windows, than
the bare general outline of dress and figure.
Nevertheless, there she stood, anxiously fixing
her eyes on one house in the row, nearly opposite
to her—the house she had looked for before
entering the lodgings; the house inhabited at that
moment by Noel Vanstone and Mrs. Lecount.

After keeping watch at the window, in silence,