about to be penetrated by a couple of broad streets. St. Giles is in the
midst of the most populous part of the town, surrounded by broad,
splendid avenues in which the gay world of London idles about, in the
immediate neighbourhood of Oxford Street, Regent Street, of Trafalgar
Square and the Strand. It is a disorderly collection of tall, three or
four-storied houses, with narrow, crooked, filthy streets, in which there
is quite as much life as in the great thoroughfares of the town, except
that, here, people of the working-class only are to be seen. A vegetable
market is held in the street, baskets with vegetables and fruits,
naturally all bad and hardly fit to use, obstruct the sidewalk still
further, and from these, as well as from the fish-dealers' stalls, arises
a horrible smell. The houses are occupied from cellar to garret, filthy
within and without, and their appearance is such that no human being
could possibly wish to live in them. But all this is nothing in
comparison with the dwellings in the narrow courts and alleys between the
streets, entered by covered passages between the houses, in which the
filth and tottering ruin surpass all description. Scarcely a whole
window-pane can be found, the walls are crumbling, door-posts and window-
frames loose and broken, doors of old boards nailed together, or
altogether wanting in this thieves' quarter, where no doors are needed,
there being nothing to steal. Heaps of garbage and ashes lie in all
directions, and the foul liquids emptied before the doors gather in
stinking pools. Here live the poorest of the poor, the worst paid
workers with thieves and the victims of prostitution indiscriminately
huddled together, the majority Irish, or of Irish extraction, and those
who have not yet sunk in the whirlpool of moral ruin which surrounds
them, sinking daily deeper, losing daily more and more of their power to
resist the demoralising influence of want, filth, and evil surroundings.

Nor is St. Giles the only London slum. In the immense tangle of streets,