"SCOTT'S" IN THE HAYMARKET.
Let us enter "Scott's" in the Haymarket. "Scott's" is the great Oyster House of London. It is a little cosy, crowded place, and not more than fifty feet deep by half as many feet in width. At any hour of the night and until two o'clock in the morning, it is possible to get oysters, fried, roasted or raw, at "Scott's." They are also cooked with cracker dust, which makes them taste as if they had been broiled in sawdust. Oysters are quite dear at "Scott's," and will cost three shillings a dozen, raw, which is a very high rate when compared with the price of our American oysters. They are small and bitter, and black, and the best of the bivalves come from Ostend in Belgium.
There is a counter at the front of the shop, and behind this counter are exposed all kinds of shell-fish, lobsters, prawns, crabs, periwinkles or "winkles," and oysters, as well as mussels. The bounding clam is unknown in England, however, and is not found amongst the edibles. Behind this counter the proprietor and his wife, and three or four male assistants in white aprons, are busily engaged opening oysters and serving up lobsters and dressed lettuce, to the customers who prefer to eat standing. To eat standing, however, is not the common custom in England, and the majority who wish to eat oysters take seats in the little stalls behind in the back room, which are exactly like our American oyster stalls, only that they are furnished with plush cushions. In these stalls are clerks, swells, men about town, Englishmen and foreigners, eating oysters and drinking Stout, or supping on lobsters and champagne, and as it is now after eleven o'clock, nearly every man in these stalls has a girl of a certain class with him, who is of course eating supper at his expense.
Upstairs there is a room somewhat similar to the one below, which is now densely crowded; but the upper room is more select. I went upstairs, and here I found a number of couples lounging in a free and easy manner, and some were calling loudly upon the waiters for brandy and water. Seated in one of these stalls is a pink-faced boy, fresh from his country home, helping with delicate attention the painted woman beside him to costly viands.
She laughs noisily as a man, flinging her arms about, and as the Champagne foams in her glass, she tosses her head like a Bacchante. But an action that by daylight would seem disgusting to the boy, is charming in the blaze of the Haymarket gaslight, and the lad looks with admiration upon the companion whom on the morrow he would pass without a nod of recognition.
The police returns for the year 1868-9, give the following figures as to the number of public women, or prostitutes, who are known to the police in the metropolitan district of London:
| Brothels. | Prostitutes. | |
| Within the districts of Westminster, Brompton, and Pimlico, there are, | 153 | 524 |
| St. James, Regent-street, Soho, Leicester-square, | 152 | 318 |
| Marylebone, Paddington, St. John's-wood, | 139 | 526 |
| Oxford-street, Portland-place, New-road, Gray's-inn-lane, | 194 | 546 |
| Covent-garden, Drury-lane, St. Giles's, | 45 | 480 |
| Clerkenwell, Pentonwell, City-road, Shoreditch, | 152 | 349 |
| Spitalfields, Houndsditch, Whitechapel, Ratcliff, | 471 | 1,803 |
| Bethnal-green, Mile-end, Shadwell to Blackwall, | 419 | 965 |
| Lambeth, Blackfriars, Waterloo-road, | 377 | 802 |
| Southwark, Bermondsey, Rotherhithe, | 178 | 667 |
| Islington, Hackney, Homerton, | 185 | 445 |
| Camberwell, Walworth, Peckham, | 65 | 228 |
| Deptford and Greenwich, | 148 | 401 |
| Kilburn, Portland, Kentish, and Camden Towns | 88 | 231 |
| Kensington, Hammersmith, Fulham, | 12 | 106 |
| Waltham-green, Chelsea, Cremorne, | 47 | 209 |
| —— | —— | |
| 2,825 | 8,600 |
For the one public woman here registered there are five who do not reside in brothels, but live alone, hiring lodgings for which they pay from eight shillings to five guineas a week, according to the manner in which the apartments are furnished, and the character of the neighborhood in which they are situated, so that it is calculated that there are seventy to eighty thousand women in London whose names do not appear in the official list of the Lost, yet lead immoral lives, and whose sin is as great in the sight of God, but less in the sight of man, as their infamy is not of that nature that the law can punish them for it.
