Hollowed in the side of this arch was a hole like the mouth of a cavern, and running under the railway supported by black pillars was a street.
This was “the street of women,” described in the early portion of this work; it was the place where Laura Stanbridge led the boy, Alf Purvis, on a dark night.
Our pedestrian walked along the street, and the women who stood at their doors brawny, repulsive, and naked as the ogresses of old, did not molest him even with their tongues.
They looked upon him with kindness, for they had heard that he was the friend and companion of the celebrated Charles Peace, the burglar, and hence it was that they gazed at him in silence, with something like a feeling of reverence.
He turned down a yard and stood opposite to a house dilapidated and apparently untenanted, but from the cellar windows of which came shouts of laughter and streams of light.
He entered by the same means as those previously described, and having gained the kitchen, which was filled with thieves and beggars, sat down in a corner by himself.
There were several men seated round a table; at a little distance from the rest a tall pale man, who was clad in the dirtiest rags, but who, nevertheless, could afford to drink gin—and doses in large quantities—was speaking.
“It’s the greatest pity in the world as that gang got broke up by the beaks; they were an honour to our English gemmen—they were an honour to our land.”
“Ye—es,” said a man with a white comforter tied over his mouth, “ye—es; so I thought till they got nabbed like that there in the country. That was a pitiful job—old hands like that goin’ time arter time on the same beat, and almost on the same lay, with the whole vorld, as one might say, before ’em. It’s jolly hard—that’s what it is.”
“I tell you how it happened,” observed another of the company, who was smoking a short pipe, “the whole country laid awake at night a watching for ’em.”