Putting her arms akimbo, and letting down each side of her mouth with wonderful expression of contempt, she exclaimed--"You whipper snapper! you oust me! You be d-----d! My house is as good as your's--aye, and better too.

I can come into your's whenever I like, and see the best that you can do for a shilling; but d-----me if you, or any body else, shall come into mine for less than a fifteen-penny negus." ~340~~ "This street and neighbourhood was wont to exhibit, nightly, a melancholy proof of early infamy.

Here might be seen a prolonged succession of juvenile voluptuaries, females, many of them under fourteen years of age, offering themselves to indiscriminate prostitution, in a state verging on absolute nudity, alluring the passengers, by every seductive wile, to the haunts of depravity, from which retreat was seldom effected without pecuniary exaction, and frequently accompanied by personal violence.

The nuisance has been partly abated, but entirely to remove it would be a task of more difficult accomplishment than that of cleansing the Augean stable, and would baffle all the labours of Hercules!" "This fact," observed Tallyho, "throws an indelible stain on metropolitan police." "Not so," answered his companion, "scarce a day passes without groups of these unfortunates being held before a magistrate, and humanely disposed of in various ways, with the view of preventing a recurrence to vicious habits,--but in vain;--the stain is more attributed to the depraved nature of man, who first seduces, and then casts off ~341~~ to infamy and indigence the unhappy victim of credulity.

Many of these wretched girls would, in all probability, gladly have abstained from the career of vice, if, on their first fall, they had experienced the consoling protection of parents or friends;--but, shut out from home,--exiled from humanity,--divested of character, and without resources,--no choice is left, other than mendicity or prostitution!"{1} The sombre reflections occasioned by these remarks gradually gave way to those of a more enlivening hue, as the two friends proceeded along the Strand.