year's end. You look in vain for any outward signs of profligacy
or debauchery. You see nothing before you but a vast number of
people, the denizens of a large and crowded city, in the needful
and rational enjoyment of air and exercise.

It grows dusk. The roads leading from the different places of
suburban resort, are crowded with people on their return home, and
the sound of merry voices rings through the gradually darkening
fields. The evening is hot and sultry. The rich man throws open
the sashes of his spacious dining-room, and quaffs his iced wine in
splendid luxury. The poor man, who has no room to take his meals
in, but the close apartment to which he and his family have been
confined throughout the week, sits in the tea-garden of some famous
tavern, and drinks his beer in content and comfort. The fields and
roads are gradually deserted, the crowd once more pour into the
streets, and disperse to their several homes; and by midnight all
is silent and quiet, save where a few stragglers linger beneath the
window of some great man's house, to listen to the strains of music
from within: or stop to gaze upon the splendid carriages which are
waiting to convey the guests from the dinner-party of an Earl.

There is a darker side to this picture, on which, so far from its
being any part of my purpose to conceal it, I wish to lay
particular stress. In some parts of London, and in many of the
manufacturing towns of England, drunkenness and profligacy in their
most disgusting forms, exhibit in the open streets on Sunday, a sad
and a degrading spectacle. We need go no farther than St. Giles's,
or Drury Lane, for sights and scenes of a most repulsive nature.
Women with scarcely the articles of apparel which common decency
requires, with forms bloated by disease, and faces rendered hideous