"Mean--why, if God had meant ye to write aboot Pacifics, He'd ha' put ye
there--and because He means ye to write aboot London town, He's put ye
there--and gien ye an unco sharp taste o' the ways o't; and I'll gie ye
anither. Come along wi' me."

And he seized me by the arm, and hardly giving me time to put on my hat,
marched me out into the streets, and away through Clare Market to St.
Giles's.

It was a foul, chilly, foggy Saturday night. From the butchers' and
greengrocers' shops the gas lights flared and flickered, wild and ghastly,
over haggard groups of slip-shod dirty women, bargaining for scraps of
stale meat and frost-bitten vegetables, wrangling about short weight and
bad quality. Fish-stalls and fruit-stalls lined the edge of the greasy
pavement, sending up odours as foul as the language of sellers and buyers.
Blood and sewer-water crawled from under doors and out of spouts, and
reeked down the gutters among offal, animal and vegetable, in every stage
of putrefaction. Foul vapours rose from cowsheds and slaughter houses, and
the doorways of undrained alleys, where the inhabitants carried the filth
out on their shoes from the back-yard into the court, and from the court
up into the main street; while above, hanging like cliffs over the
streets--those narrow, brawling torrents of filth, and poverty, and
sin,--the houses with their teeming load of life were piled up into the
dingy, choking night. A ghastly, deafening sickening sight it was. Go,
scented Belgravian! and see what London is! and then go to the library
which God has given thee--one often fears in vain--and see what science
says this London might be!

"Ay," he muttered to himself, as he strode along, "sing awa; get yoursel