yellow-bricked passage, and down a few steps,
as if going into a wine-cellar, until I found
myself standing knee-deep in the flowing sewer.

The tunnel here is about four feet high, and
six feet broad; being smaller higher up towards
the Finchley New Road, and growing gradually
larger as it descends in a winding course towards
the Thames. All main sewers may be described
roughly, as funnel-shaped; the narrow end
being at the source in the hills; the broad end
being in the valley, where it discharges into the
river. The velocity of their currents varies
from one to three miles an hour. The most
important of them discharge, at periods of the
day, in dry weather, from one thousand to two
thousand cubic feet of sewage per minute, the
greatest height being generally maintained
during the hours between nine in the morning
and five in the afternoon. At other periods of
the day the same sewers rarely discharge more
than one-fourth of this quantity. The sizes of
these underground tunnels, at different points
of their course, are constructed so that they
may convey the waters flowing through them
with no prospect of floods and consequent
bursting, and yet with no unnecessary waste
of tunnelling. Here it is that the science of
hydraulic engineering is required.

Turning our face towards the Thames, we
waded for some time, in a stooping posture,
through the sewer; three of my guides going on
first with lanterns, and two following me. We
passed through an iron tube, which conveys the
sewage over the Regent's Canal; and it was not
until we got into some lower levels, towards
Baker-street, that the sewer became sufficiently
large to allow us to stand upright.

Before we arrived at this point I had
experienced a new sensation. I had had an
opportunity of inspecting the earthenware pipe
drain—I am bound to say, the very defective
pipe drainage—of a house that once owned
me as a landlord. I felt as if the power had
been granted me of opening a trap-door in my
chest, to look upon the long-hidden machinery
of my mysterious body.

When we got into a loftier and broader part
of the tunnel, my chief guide offered me his
arm: an assistance I was glad to accept,
because the downward flood pressed rather heavily
against the back of my legs, and the bottom was
ragged and uncertain. I could not deny myself
the pleasure of calling this chief guide, Agrippa,
because Agrippa is a Roman name, and the
Romans have earned an immortality in
connexion with sewers. Whatever doubts the
sceptical school of historians may throw upon
the legends of Roman history, they cannot
shake the foundations of the Roman sewers.
Roman London means a small town, bounded
on the East by Walbrook, and on the West
by the Fleet. You cannot touch upon sewers
without coming upon traces of the Romans;
you cannot touch upon the Romans without
meeting with traces of sewers. The most
devoted disciple of Niebuhr must be dumb
before such facts as these, and must admit that
these ancient people were great scavengers, as
well as great heroes.

Agrippa took a real pleasure in pointing out
to me the different drains, private sewers, and
district sewers, which at intervals of a few yards
opened into our channel through the walls on
either side.

"We've nothin' to do with the gover'ment of
any of these," he said; "they are looked after,
or had ought to be looked after, by the paroch'al
boards."

"You look after branches?" I replied.

"Only when they're branches of prop'ly
construed main sewers. We," he continued, and
he spoke like a chairman, "are the Metropolitan
Board of Works, and we should have enough
to do if we looked after every drain-pipe in
London."

"What's the length of those drain-pipes all
over London," I  asked, "leaving out the
sewers?"

"No one knows," he said. "They do tell
me somewhere about four thousand miles, and
I should say they were all that."

We went tottering on a little further, with
the carriages rumbling on the roadway over our
heads. The splashing of the water before and
behind us, as it was washed from side to side by
the heavy boots of all our party, added to
the noise; and when our aboveground
followers let the trap-door of some side entrance
fall, a loud booming sound went through the
tunnel, as if a cannon had been fired. The
yellow lights of the lanterns danced before us,
and when we caught a glimpse of the water we
were wading in above our knees, we saw that it
was as black as ink. The smell was not at all
offensive, and Agrippa told me that no man,
during his experience in the London sewers, had
ever complained of feeling faint while he moved
about or worked in the flood; the danger was
found to consist in standing still. For all this
assurance of perfect comfort and safety, however,
my guides kept pretty close to me; and I found
out afterwards that they were thus numerous
and attentive because the "amateur" sewer
inspector was considered likely to drop.

"There," said Agrippa, pointing to a hole at
the side, down which a quantity of road sand had
been washed, "that's a gully-trap. People get a
notion that heavy rains pour down the gutters
and flush the sewers; for my part, I think they
bring quite as much rubbish as they clear away."

At different parts of our course we passed
through the blue rays of light, like moonlight,
that came down from the ventilator gratings in
the highway above. While under one of these
we heard a boy whistling in the road, and I felt
like Baron Trenck escaping from prison. Some of
these gratings over our heads were stopped up
with road rubbish; and Agrippa, who carried a
steel gauging-rod, like a sword, in his hand,
pierced the earth above us, and let in the outer
light and air.

"They're nice things," he said, alluding to
the ventilating gratings, generally set in the top
of a shaft-hole cut in the crown of the arch.