ll however agreed in one point, much as they
differed in others, and the one point was that of a perfect belief in
their individual nostrums and perfect contempt for all that was already
doing in the neighbourhood.

It was with no peculiar pleasure therefore that I rose to receive this
fresh "layman from the West"; but a single glance was enough to show me
that my visitor was a man of very different stamp from his predecessors.
There was something in the tall, manly figure, the bright smile, the
frank winning address of Edward Denison that inspired confidence in a
moment. "I come to learn, and not to teach," he laughed, as I hinted at
"theories" and their danger; and our talk soon fell on a certain "John's
Place," where he thought there was a great deal to be learned. In five
minutes more we stood in the spot which interested him, an alley running
between two mean streets, and narrowing at one end till we crept out of
it as if through the neck of a bottle. It was by no means the choicest
part of the parish: the drainage was imperfect, the houses miserable;
but wretched as it was it was a favourite haunt of the poor, and it
swarmed with inhabitants of very various degrees of respectability.
Costermongers abounded, strings of barrows were drawn up on the
pavement, and the refuse of their stock lay rotting in the gutter.
Drunken sailors and Lascars from the docks rolled along shouting to its
houses of ill-fame. There was little crime, though one of the "ladies"
of the alley was a well-known receiver of stolen goods, but there was a
good deal of drunkenness and vice. Now and then a wife came plumping on
to the pavement from a window overhead; sometimes a couple of viragoes
fought out their quarrel "on the stones"; boys idled about in the
sunshine in training to be pickpockets; miserable girls flaunted in
dirty ribbons at nightfall at half-a-dozen doors.

But with all this the place was popular with even respectable working
people in consequence of the small size and cheapness of the houses--for
there is nothing the poor like so much as a house to themselves; and the
bulk of its population consisted of casual labourers, who gathered every
morning round the great gates of the docks, waiting to be "called in" as
the ships came up to unload. The place was naturally unhealthy,
constantly haunted by fever, and had furnished some hundred cases in the
last visitation of cholera. The work done among them in the "cholera
time" had n