FTER leaving the Old Jewry Lane and passing up Cheapside, we came into the Poultry just as the rain had ceased, and as great rifts in the masses of fog were breaking through the opaque atmosphere. The Poultry is a short street which runs up to the Mansion House, and during the noon of the day is nearly impassable from the amount of traffic done there. Now the shops were all closed, and the bell of St. Paul's rang out for midnight, the echoes stealing over the city and the river in a ghostly way that thrilled through the hearts of the pedestrians who were darkness-bound in the streets. We passed through the Poultry into King William street, and on past Cannon street, with its warehouses and retail stores, by East Cheap, until we could see London Bridge, in all its vastness, looming up like a sleeping giant, the dark arches girding the river in seemingly everlasting bands.
The detective said: "Let's go down the stairs of the bridge and see some of the characters that find board and lodging down the steps. They're a hawful set, some on 'em."
The Thames lay at our feet, spread out like a map. The sky was clearing, and the river was very quiet. Now and then the sullen waters, driven in an eddy against the huge piers, could be heard plashing in a secret, stealthy manner, and anon they would recede and come back again, plash! plash! plash! All about us was so still; not a sound to be heard as we leaned over one of the alcoves in the bridge. Below us, to the left, the Catharine Docks, full of shipping; the London Docks, full of shipping; Shadwell lined with lighter craft—all so still, and the million of masts looking ghostly in the holy light of the midnight. Over on the right, Bermondsey-way, more shipping—countless spars pointing up to the midnight skies; the Pool choked with shipping—coal barges, eel-boats, East India vessels, brigs and schooners, barks and black-hulled packets, lying high in the water; flat-bottomed barges for carrying sand and for dredging; the gray coping stones of the Tower hanging over the water, and the stillness of death on noisy Rotherhithe, and a pall over the immense West India docks.
This great river, this river of all the nations of the world, with their tributes laid at her docks and their gifts on her broad bosom—how quiet it is just now. A matchless stream for its congregated wealth. Miles of warehouses, miles of stone docks, miles of shipping, and thousands of seamen. And yet a dirty and turbid and ungrateful river at times, when it overflows the fish-stalls, when it overflows the high street in Wapping and drowns myriads of rats in Upper and Lower Thames street.
VAGRANCY AND PAUPERISM.
We went down the "London Stairs." Every bridge that spans the Thames has four stairs or flights of stone-steps running down to the water's edge. These stone stairs are generally twenty or twenty-five feet wide, and they run down, for a hundred broad, massive and capacious steps, to where the tide comes in. There are turns in the stairs, and stone platforms—where the magnificent stone embankment has not been completed, as it is at Westminster Bridge down the river—under whose vast arches hundreds of human beings find shelter from the inclemency of the weather. I may say here that there is not such a city in the world as London for vagrancy and vagabondism of the worst kind despite the fact that there are 7,000 police in the metropolitan district; and besides this force for prevention, the work-houses in the West District, composing Kensington, Fulham, Paddington, Chelsea, St. George's, Hanover Square, St. Margaret, and St. John, and Westminster, furnish in and out door relief to 18,000 persons. Marylebone, Hampstead, St. Pancras, Islington, and Hackney, in the North District, provide for 24,820 persons. St. Giles, St. George, Bloomsbury, the Strand, Holborn, and City of London, in the Central District, provide for 19,127 persons. Shoreditch, Bethnal Green, Whitechapel, St. George in the East, Stepney, Mile End Town, and Poplar, provide for 28,713 persons, in the East District. In the Southern District, St. Saviour, Southwark, Rotherhithe, and Bermondsey; in St. Olave's, Lambeth, Wandsworth, and Clapham, Camberwell, Greenwich, Woolwich, and Lewisham, there is provision for 38,487 persons. Here we have a total of 128,880 men, women, and children, occupants of the union work-houses of the metropolis of London, with a population of less than three and a half millions. Besides this number, there are thousands of casuals who receive lodgings in the work-houses; and outside this fearful aggregate there are roaming in and about London at least 15,000 vagrants—or, as they would be called in America, "bummers"—who do not frequent the work-houses from various reasons, and consequently have to "bunk out," as we would call it in New York.
At the bottom of some of the bridges there are heaps of rubbish and old rotting planking, some of which rubbish is carried off when the tide leaves the stones of the bridges. Then there are old boat-houses, and rows of long, stout-built boats for hire; but at night there are no persons to watch these boats, and they are used as berths to sleep in by the vagrant vagabonds who haunt the recesses of the bridges. When the tide recedes in the Thames, it generally leaves a space of twenty to two hundred feet of the inshore bottom of the river bare on the Surrey side, and this is generally a soft, drab-looking mud, with a treacherous look, where man or beast might be swallowed up without any warning. When the detective and I went down into the dark recesses of London Bridge, that night, the river was at the flood, and the rubbish was being carried away by the incoming tide. This was on the Surrey side of the river. There were about a dozen persons beneath the first archway, making, in fact, a perfect gypsy encampment. Eight of these persons were of the male sex, and beside these there were two old haggard-looking women and a grown girl of twenty years or thereabouts, and a child of ten years, in all the glory of rags and destitution. The oldest man in the party might have been fifty years of age, and the others were younger, one of them being a stout, able-bodied young fellow of eighteen or nineteen. Some of the party were asleep, and were snoring most comfortably, as the rain did not penetrate to their place of sleeping; but every few minutes a gust of wind came howling down the river and burst through the arches with a mad fury, making the sleepers turn uneasily on the stone steps.
THE CADGER'S MEAL.