words what was meant by Ragged Schools as a generic term, including,
then, four or five similar places of instruction. I wrote to the
masters of this particular school to make some further inquiries,
and went myself soon afterwards.

It was a hot summer night; and the air of Field Lane and Saffron
Hill was not improved by such weather, nor were the people in those
streets very sober or honest company. Being unacquainted with the
exact locality of the school, I was fain to make some inquiries
about it. These were very jocosely received in general; but
everybody knew where it was, and gave the right direction to it.
The prevailing idea among the loungers (the greater part of them the
very sweepings of the streets and station houses) seemed to be, that
the teachers were quixotic, and the school upon the whole "a lark".
But there was certainly a kind of rough respect for the intention,
and (as I have said) nobody denied the school or its whereabouts, or
refused assistance in directing to it.

It consisted at that time of either two or three--I forget which--
miserable rooms, upstairs in a miserable house. In the best of
these, the pupils in the female school were being taught to read and
write; and though there were among the number, many wretched
creatures steeped in degradation to the lips, they were tolerably
quiet, and listened with apparent earnestness and patience to their
instructors. The appearance of this room was sad and melancholy, of
course--how could it be otherwise!--but, on the whole, encouraging.

The close, low chamber at the back, in which the boys were crowded,
was so foul and stifling as to be, at first, almost insupportable.
But its moral aspect was so far worse than its physical, that this