men would think of paying. In such places as these
you are as sure to be injured as if you sat all night carousing in a
public-house. These women with forced smiles on their painted cheeks are
the veritable Harpies. Theirs is the true sardonic laugh. Do you
remember one way in which that ancient phrase is accounted for?
Sardinia, it was said, was noted for a bitter herb which contracted the
features of those who tasted it. Pausanias says it is a plant like
parsley, which grows near springs, and causes people who eat it to laugh
till they die; and these women, have they not eaten a bitter plant, and
do they not laugh and die? Beware of the women. Beware of the men. See
how their cunning eyes glisten if you change a sovereign. If they can
get you into a neighbouring public-house and rob you, they will be rather
pleased than otherwise. Look at that tall dark fellow watching us. It
was only the other day he met a man here, as he might you or I, and
decoyed him into a public-house close by, where his confederates were
waiting, and robbed him of forty pounds when they thought their victim
was sufficiently "fuddled" with champagne. He and such as he are not
particular who they rob. They do not spare the women, I assure you.

Let us now turn towards Covent-garden. The debauchery of Covent-garden
is not what it was. Obscenity is banished from the Cave of Harmony, and
better hours are kept; but there are night coffee-houses about here,
dirty, shabby places, patronised by dirty, shabby people. How weary and
wayworn are the women! They have been walking the streets for
hours--they have been dancing in neighbouring saloons--they have paraded
their meretricious charms, and here they sit, hungry, tired, sleepy, and
't is three o'clock in the morning. No home have they to go to but some
wretched room for which they pay a sum equal to the entire rent of the
house. There is little gaiety here; the poor comic nigger, with his
banjo and his double entendre playing with all his might, in the hope
that some gent will stand a cup of coffee and a muffin, can scarce raise
a laugh. Timidly one asks, "Will you treat me to a cup of coffee, sir?"
Yes, forlorn one. If your sin is great, so is your punishment; once you
might have been a dainty little wife, and now what are you? I say it
sorrowfully, the scum of the streets, garbage for drunken lust.

Let us go a little further on, not into that house, there are only
thieves and