window
filled with flame. The roof fell inwards with a crash and a rain of
sparks.

Clerkenwell has never forgiven Luigi. Luigi has never forgiven himself.

A BASHER'S NIGHT

HOXTON

_LONDON JUNE_

_Rank odours ride on every breeze;
Skyward a hundred towers loom;
And factories throb and workshops wheeze,
And children pine in secret gloom.
To squabbling birds the roofs declaim
Their little tale of misery;
And, smiling over murk and shame,
A wild rose blows by Bermondsey._

_Where every traffic-thridden street
Is ribboned o'er with shade and shine,
And webbed with wire and choked with heat;
Where smokes with fouler smokes entwine;
And where, at evening, darkling lanes
Fume with a sickly ribaldry--
Above the squalors and the pains,
A wild rose blows by Bermondsey._

_Somewhere beneath a nest of tiles
My little garret window squats,
Staring across the cruel miles,
And wondering of kindlier spots.
An organ, just across the way,
Sobs out its ragtime melody;
But in my heart it seems to play:
A wild rose blows by Bermondsey!_

_And dreams of happy morning hills
And woodlands laced with greenest boughs
Are mine to-day amid the ills
Of Tooley Street and wharfside sloughs,
Though Cherry Gardens reek and roar,
And engines gasp their horrid glee;
I mark their ugliness no more:
A wild rose blows by Bermondsey._

A BASHER'S NIGHT

HOXTON

Hoxton is not merely virile; it is virulent. Life here hammers in the
blood with something of the insistence of ragtime. The people--men,
women, and children--are alive, spitefully alive. You feel that they are
ready to do you damage, with or without reason. Here are antagonism and
desire, stripped for battle. Little children, of three years old, have
the spirit in them; for they lean from tenement landings that jut over
the street, and, with becoming seriousness, spit upon the passing
pedestrians, every hit scoring two to the marksman.

The colour of Hoxton Street is a tremendous purple. It springs upon you,
as you turn from Old Street, and envelops you. There are high, black
tenement houses. There are low cottages and fumbling passages. There are
mellow fried-fish shops at every few yards. There are dirty beer-houses
and a few public-houses. There are numerous cast