If you care, I can take you through an awfully dangerous place where the police never go." He seemed so anxious for the honour that Shelton was loath to disappoint him.

"I come here pretty often," he went on, as they ascended a sort of alley rambling darkly between a wall and row of houses.
"Why ?" asked Shelton; "it does n't smell too nice." The young man threw up his nose and sniffed, as if eager to add any new scent that might be about to his knowledge of life.
"No, that's one of the reasons, you know," he said; "one must find out.
The darkness is jolly, too; anything might happen here.

Last week there was a murder; there 's always the chance of one." Shelton stared; but the charge of morbidness would not lie against this fresh-cheeked stripling.
"There's a splendid drain just here," his guide resumed; "the people are dying like flies of typhoid in those three houses"; and under the first light he turned his grave, cherubic face to indicate the houses.

"If we were in the East End, I could show you other places quite as good.
There's a coffee-stall keeper in one that knows all the thieves in London; he 's a splendid type, but," he added, looking a little anxiously at Shelton, "it might n't be safe for you.

With me it's different; they 're beginning to know me.