his comprehension, strode back to
the town and bent his way homeward.

Between two and three hours after Percival thus parted from the sweeper,
a man whose dress was little in accordance with the scene in which we
present him, threaded his way through a foul labyrinth of alleys in the
worst part of St. Giles's,--a neighbourhood, indeed, carefully shunned
at dusk by wealthy passengers; for here dwelt not only Penury in its
grimmest shape, but the desperate and dangerous guilt which is not to
be lightly encountered in its haunts and domiciles. Here children
imbibe vice with their mother's milk. Here Prostitution, commencing with
childhood, grows fierce and sanguinary in the teens, and leagues with
theft and murder. Here slinks the pickpocket, here emerges the burglar,
here skulks the felon. Yet all about and all around, here, too, may
be found virtue in its rarest and noblest form,--virtue outshining
circumstance and defying temptation; the virtue of utter poverty, which
groans, and yet sins not. So interwoven are these webs of penury and
fraud that in one court your life is not safe; but turn to the right
hand, and in the other, you might sleep safely in that worse than Irish
shealing, though your pockets were full of gold. Through these haunts
the ragged and penniless may walk unfearing, for they have nothing to
dread from the lawless,--more, perhaps, from the law; but the wealthy,
the respectable, the spruce, the dainty, let them beware the spot,
unless the policeman is in sight or day is in the skies!

As this passenger, whose appearance, as we have implied, was certainly
not that of a denizen, turned into one of the alleys, a rough hand
seized him by the arm, and suddenly a group of girls and tatterdemalions
issued from a house, in which the lower shutters unclosed showed a light
burning, and surrounded him with a hoarse whoop.

The passenger whispered a word in the ear of the grim blackguard who had
seized him, and his arm was instantly released.

"Hist! a pal,--he has the catch," said the blackguard, surlily. The
group gave way, and by the light of the clear starlit skies, and a
single lamp hung at the entrance of the alley, gazed upon the stranger.
But they made no effort to detain him; and as he disappeared in the
distant shadows, hastened back into the wretched hostlery where they had
been merry-making. Meanwhile, the stranger gained a narrow court, and
stopped before a house in one of its angles,--a house t