ial activities of the district. The cab was threading a hazardous
way through the cosmopolitan throng crowding the street. On either side
of me extended a row of stalls, seemingly established in opposition to
the more legitimate shops upon the inner side of the pavement.

Jewish hawkers, many of them in their shirt-sleeves, acclaimed the
rarity of the bargains which they had to offer; and, allowing for the
difference of costume, these tireless Israelites, heedless of climatic
conditions, sweating at their mongery, might well have stood, not in a
squalid London thoroughfare, but in an equally squalid market-street of
the Orient.

They offered linen and fine raiment; from footgear to hair-oil their
wares ranged. They enlivened their auctioneering with conjuring tricks
and witty stories, selling watches by the aid of legerdemain, and fancy
vests by grace of a seasonable anecdote.

Poles, Russians, Serbs, Roumanians, Jews of Hungary, and Italians
of Whitechapel mingled in the throng. Near East and Far East rubbed
shoulders. Pidgin English contested with Yiddish for the ownership of
some tawdry article offered by an auctioneer whose nationality defied
conjecture, save that always some branch of his ancestry had drawn
nourishment from the soil of Eternal Judea.

Some wearing mens' caps, some with shawls thrown over their oily locks,
and some, more true to primitive instincts, defying, bare-headed, the
unkindly elements, bedraggled women--more often than not burdened with
muffled infants--crowded the pavements and the roadway, thronged about
the stalls like white ants about some choicer carrion.

And the fine drizzling rain fell upon all alike, pattering upon the hood
of the taxi-cab, trickling down the front windows; glistening upon the
unctuous hair of those in the street who were hatless; dewing the bare
arms of the auctioneers, and dripping, melancholy, from the tarpaulin
coverings of the stalls. Heedless of the rain above and of the mud
beneath, North, South, East, and West mingled their cries, their bids,
their blandishments, their raillery, mingled their persons in that
joyless throng.

Sometimes a yellow face showed close to one of the streaming windows;
sometimes a black-eyed, pallid face, but never a face wholly sane and
healthy. This was an underworld where squalor and vice went hand in hand
through the beautiless streets, a melting-pot of the world's outcasts;
this was the shadowland, which last night had swa