e fiery flags, and anon
dying into a blue hiss. Discordant singing, more like the howling of
wild beasts, came from the corner houses, which blazed like the gates
of hell. Their doors were ever on the swing, and the hot odours of death
rushed out, and the cold blast of life rushed in. We paused a little
before one of them--over the door, upon the sign, was in very deed the
name Death. There were ragged women within who took their half-dead
babies from their bare, cold, cheerless bosoms, and gave them of the
poison of which they themselves drank renewed despair in the name of
comfort. They say that most of the gin consumed in London is drunk by
women. And the little clay-coloured baby-faces made a grimace or two,
and sank to sleep on the thin tawny breasts of the mothers, who having
gathered courage from the essence of despair, faced the scowling night
once more, and with bare necks and hopeless hearts went--whither? Where
do they all go when the gin-hells close their yawning jaws? Where do
they lie down at night? They vanish like unlawfully risen corpses in
the graves of cellars and garrets, in the charnel-vaults of
pestiferously-crowded lodging-houses, in the prisons of police-stations,
under dry arches, within hoardings; or they make vain attempts to rest
the night out upon door-steps or curbstones. All their life long man
denies them the one right in the soil which yet is so much theirs, that
once that life is over, he can no longer deny it--the right of room
to lie down. Space itself is not allowed to be theirs by any right of
existence: the voice of the night-guardian commanding them to move on,
is as the howling of a death-hound hunting them out of the air into
their graves.

In St. James's we came upon a group around the gates of a great house.
Visitors were coming and going, and it was a show to be had for nothing
by those who had nothing to pay. Oh! the children with clothes too
ragged to hold pockets for their chilled hands, that stared at the
childless duchess descending from her lordly carriage! Oh! the wan
faces, once lovely as theirs, it may be, that gazed meagre and pinched
and hungry on the young maidens in rose-colour and blue, tripping
lightly through the avenue of their eager eyes--not yet too envious of
unattainable felicity to gaze with admiring sympathy on those who seemed
to them the angels, the goddesses of their kind. 'O God!' I thought, but
dared not speak, 'and thou couldst make all these girl