This is the house in which we stand where the burglary was planned—whence the murderer and the murdered set out together on their fatal journey. It was at one of these tables that the young girl discussed her absent lover's fate with her new lord, his murderer, and it was here that the police came to search for him and found the girl whose evidence helped to hang him.
Look at the people who sit there to-day—murderers and burglars some of them, cheats and pickpockets others, and a few respectable folks as far as their opportunities will allow. But remember that dozens of really respectable families do have to frequent these places now, and mix with malefactors day and night, because there are no other places open to them.
Among all the cruelties practised on the poor in the name of Metropolitan improvements this one deserves mentioning—that the labourer earning a precarious livelihood with his wife and his children have been driven at last to accept the shelter of a thieves' kitchen and to be thankful for it.
CHAPTER III.
I cannot help being struck, in my wanderings through Povertyopolis, with the extraordinary resemblance which Caesar bore to Pompey—especially Pompey. One room in this district is very like the other. The family likeness of the chairs and tables is truly remarkable, especially in the matter of legs. Most chairs are born with four legs, but the chairs one meets with here are a two-legged race—a four-legged chair is a rara avis, and when found should be made a note of. The tables, too, are of a type indigenous to the spot. The survival of the fittest does not obtain in these districts in the matter of tables. The most positively unfit are common, very common objects. What has become of the fittest I hesitate to conjecture. Possibly they have run away. I am quite sure that a table with legs would make use of them to escape from such surroundings.
As to the bedsteads, they are wretched, broken-down old things of wood and iron that look as though they had been rescued a little late from a fire, then used for a barricade, afterwards buried in volcanic eruption, and finally dug out of a dust-heap that had concealed them for a century. The bedding, a respectable coal-sack would blush to acknowledge even as a poor relation.
I have enumerated chairs, tables, and beds, not because they are found in every poor home—there are several rented rooms which can boast of nothing but four walls, a ceiling, and a floor—but because these articles placed in one of these dens constitute what are euphemistically called 'furnished apartments,' a species of accommodation with which all very poor neighbourhoods abound.
The 'furnished apartments' fetch as much as tenpence a day, and are sometimes occupied by three or four different tenants during a week.