iffe-highway. It is night, and the glare of gas gives the street a
cheerful appearance. We pass the Sailor's Home, a noble institution
which deserves our cordial support and praise, and find at almost every
step pitfalls for poor Jack. Every few yards we come to a beer-shop or a
public-house, the doors of which stand temptingly open, and from the
upper room of which may be heard the sound of the mirth-inspiring violin,
and the tramp of toes neither "light nor fantastic." There were
public-houses here--I know not if the custom prevails now--to which was
attached a crew of infamous women; these bring Jack into the house to
treat them, but while Jack drinks gin the landlord gives them from
another tap water, and then against their sober villany poor Jack has no
chance. I fear many respectable people in this neighbourhood have thus
made fortunes. Jack is prone to grog and dancing, and here they meet him
at every turn. Women, wild-eyed, boisterous, with cheeks red with rouge
and flabby with intemperance, decked out with dresses and ribbons of the
gayest hue, are met with by hundreds--all alike equally coarse, and
insolent, and unlovely in manners and appearance, but all equally
resolved on victimising poor Jack. They dance with him in the
beer-shop--they drink with him in the bar--they walk with him in the
streets--they go with him to such places as Wilton's Music Hall, where
each Jack Tar may be seen sitting with his pipe and his pot, witnessing
dramatic performances not very artistic, but really, on the score of
morality, not so objectionable as what I have seen applauded by an
Adelphi audience, or patronised by the upper classes at her Majesty's
Theatre. And thus the evening passes away; the publicans grow rich, the
keepers of infamous houses fatten on their dishonest gains--obese Jews
and Jewesses become more so. The grog gets into Jack's head--the unruly
tongue of woman is loosened--there are quarrels, and blows, and blood
drawn, and heads broken, and cries of police, and victims in abundance
for the station-house, or the hospital, or the union-house, or the
lunatic asylum, save when some forlorn one (and not seldom either is this
the case), reft of hope or maddened by drink and shame, plunges in the
muddy waters of some neighbouring dock, to find the oblivion she found
not in the dancing and drinking houses of Ratcliffe-highway.

JUDGE AND JURY CLUBS.

This is a comic age in which we live. We are ove