interrupted the driver. 'Don't you be in a
hurry, coachman,' replied the girl, 'and recollect I want to be set down
in Cold Bath Fields--large house with a high garden-wall in front; you
can't mistake it. Hallo. Bella, where are you going to--you'll pull my
precious arm off?' This was addressed to the younger girl, who, in her
anxiety to hide herself in the caravan, had ascended the steps first, and
forgotten the strain upon the handcuff. 'Come down, and let's show you
the way.' And after jerking the miserable girl down with a force which
made her stagger on the pavement, she got into the vehicle, and was
followed by her wretched companion.

These two girls had been thrown upon London streets, their vices and
debauchery, by a sordid and rapacious mother. What the younger girl was
then, the elder had been once; and what the elder then was, the younger
must soon become. A melancholy prospect, but how surely to be realised;
a tragic drama, but how often acted! Turn to the prisons and police
offices of London--nay, look into the very streets themselves. These
things pass before our eyes, day after day, and hour after hour--they
have become such matters of course, that they are utterly disregarded.
The progress of these girls in crime will be as rapid as the flight of a
pestilence, resembling it too in its baneful influence and wide-spreading
infection. Step by step, how many wretched females, within the sphere of
every man's observation, have become involved in a career of vice,
frightful to contemplate; hopeless at its commencement, loathsome and
repulsive in its course; friendless, forlorn, and unpitied, at its
miserable conclusion!

There were other prisoners--boys of ten, as hardened in vice as men of
fifty--a houseless vagrant, going joyfully to prison as a place of food
and shelter, handcuffed to a man whose prospects were ruined, character
lost, and family rendered destitute, by his first offence. Our
curiosity, however, was satisfied. The first group had left an
impression on our mind we would gladly have avoided, and would willingly
have effaced.

The crowd dispersed; the vehicle rolled away with its load of guilt and
misfortune; and we saw no more of the Prisoners' Van.

TALES

CHAPTER I--THE BOARDING-HOUSE

CHAPTER I.

Mrs. Tibbs was, beyond all dispute, the most tidy, fidgety, thrifty
little personage that ever inhaled the smoke of London; and the house of
Mrs. Tibbs was, decide