first-floor back-room. Phew! Sweet home!
Why, the smell sends us precipitately back, with
camphor-ball to nose, before we have advanced
three paces. The course of my duty has led me
to become acquainted with more foul smells than
most of my friends have encountered, and I
declare the one we are inhaling to have an inkling
of them all. There is the horrible entomological
aroma prevalent in the Field-lane Refuge, when
its occupants have been in bed an hour or so;
the wretched tramp-smell of an overcrowded
casual ward; the stench of an ill-smelling drain;
the flavour of boiled greens, of onions, of
strong cheese, of bad meat; and mingling with,
and overriding all, is the dreadful odour of a
sick-room, in which nurses are careless and
patients uncleanly. There is no mistaking any
one of these, and no exaggerating their
conjunctive effect. Unconsciously at the time, but
with a morbid exactitude which enables me to
shudderingly recal them now, I mentally tick
off each noisome flavour before I reach the
door, and then, hanging out of the broken sashless
window on the staircase, inhale the breezes
from the closet, dust-heap, and water-butt in the
yard, until, on the principle of one poison
neutralising another, the sickening sense of
nausea is subdued, and I am able to look in-doors
again.

The filthy bedding in the corner on which
that drunken Irishman is stertorously sleeping
himself sober, together with the dirty flooring
and neglected walls, account for the obvious
prevalence of nameless insects; while the food
being cooked in one part of the room and
devoured in another; the poor sickly woman with
her baby in the second bed; the crying child
with the discoloured bandage round its head;
the numbers seated within the four narrow
walls, at the apparent rate of about three
square feet per soul; the corduroy and fustian
garments before the fire, and the steaming rags
suspended from the lines running across the
room, supply the other scents. This is a working
man's sweet home. This is his retreat after
the labours of the day are over, for the
attractions of which it is expected he will decline
roaming amid pleasures and (gin) palaces, and
in which he fosters that attachment to throne
and laws which conduces—let me repeat Mr.
Gladstone's florid words—more than gold or
silver, more than fleets or armies, to the strength,
glory, and safety of the land. It is through
no fault of his that he is condemned to live,
breathe, and have his being, in an atmosphere
and with surroundings which are slowly poisoning
his life-blood, and paralysing his stout arm.
He need be neither idle, vicious, nor improvident,
to come to this. Given, daily labour
at a specified part of the metropolis, and you
will see that he must live within a reasonable
distance of it. Admit the necessity of this,
count the number of houses fit for his occupation
and suitable to his means; and overcrowding,
together with a persistent violation of sanitary
laws resulting in disease and death, will be
seen to be as natural, as that a tree should bring
forth fruit after its kind. Add to this, that the
owner of the house and yard we have visited,
can in practice snap his fingers at the sanitary
inspection under which it is theoretically
put; keep in mind that the competition for
house-room is so fierce, that decent labourers
are compelled to herd in these miserable dens;
that the increase of railways and the spread of
improvement are adding to the evil daily, by pulling
down small tenements; and then wonder if
you can at the spread of epidemics, and the
heaviness of the metropolitan death-rate.

Pye-street has been selected for visitation
because of its proximity to the Houses of Parliament;
and because, as I shall point out, it has
also shown itself capable of better things.
Let us now turn for a moment to Bit-alley,
Clerkenwell. It contains twelve houses, with a
total of twenty-nine rooms. Of these, two are
occupied by donkeys, and the remaining twenty-
seven form the homes of eighty-three human
creatures. The average width of this alley is six
feet six inches; one room here with a cubic area
of one thousand and fifty feet is occupied by
six souls, a man, his wife, and four children;
and another with a cubic area of seven hundred
and seventy feet holds a man, his wife, and two
children. The inhabitants of the adjacent Sheep-
court, and Friar's Inn-alley, make up with the
eighty-three here, a population of one hundred
and ninety-two, who have but two necessary out-
houses and one water tank among them, the latter
being invariably dry on Sundays. At Narrow-
yard, in the same parish, three separate families
were crammed into two rooms without water-
supply or closets, and were compelled to beg
water and make shift as they could, until
the wretched places became so dilapidated as
to be pulled down under the Dangerous Structures
Act. The ground on which they formerly
rotted, is now vacant. It has been calculated
that three thousand five hundred houses,
accommodating twenty thousand working people,
have been destroyed by the extension of
metropolitan railways alone, during the years
preceding 1865; and I learn, on testimony which
is indisputable, that one thousand three hundred
houses, chiefly belonging to working men, are
now under sentence from the same cause.

On leaving the wretched Pye-street house we
had examined, we carefully picked our way
among shoals of sickly children, who crowded
every door-step and pursued the genial sports
of battledore, tip-cat, and hopscotch, in the
roadway; and glancing opposite, saw two fine
piles of buildings, which, standing side by side,
are monuments to the practical benevolence of
those erecting them. Into these we did not go.
The writer knows their neat cleanliness, their
comforts, and their luxuries, well; for they
resemble, in all essential particulars, the other
model dwellings he has seen, are built by the
same agency, and are subject to the same laws.
The contrast between their trim uniformity and
the wretched squalor of the side of the street we
have left, make them fairly represent the opposite
extremes of comfort and misery. But Pye-