type.

A policeman was stationed near the entrance of the street. After they
had passed him, Mr. Peabody ran back and said a word in his ear.

"I gave him your name," he said briefly, in answer to Raeburn's
interrogative look, when he returned, "and told him what we were after.
The street is not quite as bad as it was; and there are little oases of
respectability in it you would never expect. But there is plenty of the
worst thieving and brutality left in it still. Of course, now you see it
at its dull moment. To-night the place will swarm with barrows and
stalls, all the people will be in the street, and after dark it will be
as near pandemonium as may be. I happen to know the School Board visitor
of these parts; and a City Missionary, too, who is afraid of nothing."

And standing still a moment, pointing imperceptibly to right and left,
he began in his shy, monotonous voice to run through the inhabitants of
some of the houses and a few typical histories. This group was mainly
peopled by women of the very lowest class and their "bullies"--that is
to say, the men who aided them in plundering, sometimes in murdering,
the stranger who fell into their claws; in that house a woman had been
slowly done to death by her husband and his brutal brothers under every
circumstance of tragic horror; in the next a case of flagrant and
revolting cruelty to a pair of infant children had just been brought to
light. In addition to its vice and its thievery, the wretched place was,
of course, steeped in drink. There were gin-palaces at all the corners;
the women drank, in proportion to their resources, as badly as the men,
and the children were fed with the stuff in infancy, and began for
themselves as early as they could beg or steal a copper of their own.

When the dismal catalogue was done, they moved on towards the further
end of the street, and a house on the right hand side. Behind the veil
of his official manner Aldous's shrinking sense took all it saw and
heard as fresh food for a darkness and despondency of soul already great
enough. But his companion--a young enthusiast, secretly very critical of
"big-wigs"--was conscious only of the trained man of affairs,
courteous, methodical, and well-informed, putting a series of
preliminary questions with unusual point and rapidity.

Suddenly, under the influence of a common impression, both men stood
still and looked about them. There was a stir in the street. Windows had
been thrown