HUNTING THE SEWERS.
IDDEN in the bosoms of the sewers of every Great City lies a world of romance. The secrets of thousands of human beings, with their hopes and aspirations, their defeats and disappointments, are garnered, in the relics of myriad households, whose rubbish is shot through drains, to be imbedded in the accumulated masses at the bottom of the soggy sewerage.
London has two thousand miles of bricked sewers, and the entire metropolis is honey-combed by these effluvious passages.
These sewers are, of course, choked with refuse and swarming with rats and other pestiferous vermin, by night and day, and are pervaded with noxious gases, which, when inhaled, cause almost instantaneous death. The rats grow as big as kittens in the sewers, and will face strong, healthy men, and give them combat—in legions. The rats feed on offal from the butchers' slaughter houses, which is poured into the sewers, and they also subsist on the grain which comes from the breweries, in different parts of the city.
Twenty years ago, the main sewers of London, having their outlets on the river side, were completely open, and it was lawful to enter them to search for valuables, but since then so many people have died of the gases, or have lost themselves in their noxious recesses, that a law was at last passed, by which persons entering the sewers to explore them, unless they were employed as workmen, became amenable to imprisonment, and at present the law is strictly enforced.