r the heart around which
the gay and fashionable, the learned, the artistic, the virtuous, the
religious are gathered, a people some of whom are barbarous, some cruel,
many miserable, many unhappy, save for brief moments not of hope, but
of defiance, distilled in the alembic of the brain from gin: what better
life could steam up from such a Phlegethon! Look there: "Cream of the
Valley!" As if the mocking serpent must with sweet words of Paradise
deepen the horrors of the hellish compound, to which so many of our
brothers and sisters made in the image of God, fly as to their only
Saviour from the misery of feeling alive.'

'How is it that the civilized people of London do not make a
simultaneous inroad upon the haunts of the demons and drive them out?'

'It is a mercy they do not. They would only do infinite mischief. The
best notion civilization seems to have is--not to drive out the demons,
but to drive out the possessed; to take from them the poor refuges they
have, and crowd them into deeper and more fetid hells--to make room for
what?--more and more temples in which Mammon may be worshipped. The
good people on the other hand invade them with foolish tracts, that lie
against God; or give their money to build churches, where there is
as yet no people that will go to them. Why, the other day, a young
clergyman bored me, and would have been boring me till now, I think, if
I would have let him, to part with a block of my houses, where I know
every man, woman, and child, and keep them in comparative comfort and
cleanliness and decency, to say no more, that he might pull them down
and build a church upon the site--not quite five minutes' walk from the
church where he now officiates.'

It was a blowing, moon-lit night. The gaslights flickered and wavered in
the gusts of wind. It was cold, very cold for the season. Even Falconer
buttoned his coat over his chest. He got a few paces in advance of me
sometimes, when I saw him towering black and tall and somewhat gaunt,
like a walking shadow. The wind increased in violence. It was a
north-easter, laden with dust, and a sense of frozen Siberian steppes.
We had to stoop and head it at the corners of streets. Not many people
were out, and those who were, seemed to be hurrying home. A few little
provision-shops, and a few inferior butchers' stalls were still open.
Their great jets of gas, which looked as if they must poison the meat,
were flaming fierce and horizontal, roaring lik