who succeed in keeping a penny or two until evening, enter a
lodging-house, such as abound in every great city, where they find a bed.
But what a bed! These houses are filled with beds from cellar to garret,
four, five, six beds in a room; as many as can be crowded in. Into every
bed four, five, or six human beings are piled, as many as can be packed
in, sick and well, young and old, drunk and sober, men and women, just as
they come, indiscriminately. Then come strife, blows, wounds, or, if
these bedfellows agree, so much the worse; thefts are arranged and things
done which our language, grown more humane than our deeds, refuses to
record. And those who cannot pay for such a refuge? They sleep where
they find a place, in passages, arcades, in corners where the police and
the owners leave them undisturbed. A few individuals find their way to
the refuges which are managed, here and there, by private charity, others
sleep on the benches in the parks close under the windows of Queen
Victoria. Let us hear the London _Times_:

"It appears from the report of the proceedings at Marlborough Street
Police Court in our columns of yesterday, that there is an average
number of 50 human beings of all ages, who huddle together in the
parks every night, having no other shelter than what is supplied by
the trees and a few hollows of the embankment. Of these, the majority
are young girls who have been seduced from the country by the soldiers
and turned loose on the world in all the destitution of friendless
penury, and all the recklessness of early vice.

"This is truly horrible! Poor there must be everywhere. Indigence
will find its way and set up its hideous state in the heart of a great
and luxurious city. Amid the thousand narrow lanes and by-streets of
a populous metropolis there must always, we fear, be much
suffering--much that offends the eye--much that lurks unseen.