The daily morning journal and courier., 1894-09-08

trance to notorious Leather Lane. Scarcely wide enough beneath the back windows of the inn to permit tho en- trance of donkey and cart, 1t gradually widens toward Theobolds Row, and to the east and west is itself entered by almost numberless shadowy closes and wynds.
 No casual frequenter of Holborn would notice 1t, but the locality is one Of the densest in London in point Of
 population. Among the countless lowly
 humans existing here, fully thousand
 are costermongers. and. in winter. half
 as many are gipsies
 While the costers pride themselves on their utterly reckless lives and
 nightly carousals. from their stand
 point of ethics their gipsy neighbors are not fairly progressive. They are
 too quiet. They attend closely to work and minimize the III effects of the awful poverty of London's lowly.
 As we entered the grewsome place and passed the famous Leather Bottle tap. the resort of all this teming rabble,
 a casual remark by Ikey disclosed the
 social standards of noisome Leather
 Lane and the costers' opinions of Its
 wintry gipsy inhabitants.
 Cor bli me! 'Ow can hus costers
 ave comfort hout Q hour neighbors less hus can 'elp carry 'em 'ome now
 an agin from tn Leather Bottle? Strike me lucky! If I'll doan't believe they'd rawther heat wittles than lick
 pewter Clicking pewter" 1t must be
 known. is coster for guzzling -four
 ale.'D Gawd's truth, but ye awsk one O 'em fur tn loan O bob (shilling)
 fur a few pots at tn Bottle, an their bloody heyes stick bout like bleedin | mussels. Cor bli me, so they dor' About half way from Furnival's Inn
 to Theobold's Row, a narrow, dingy court wriggled an hundred feet or
 more to the east. To the right and left the ramshackle yet stout old house fronts seemed pitching at each other
 threateningly.
 From the noisome pavement, packed
 with donkey carts and barrows and al- most impossible and raven-lke hu- | mans, to the house-roofs hundreds of the old and young seemed hanging from trembling balconies and tottering
 window stills; and as We halted at the
 corner I could not but reflect that the
 density of woeful human life must be | inconceivably terrible behind these
 outer hideous walls
 That's Ter pallus!-as hodd bunk
 in'-place as never ye clapped heyes on,
 governor" said 1key, pointing to the
 wedge-like end of the narrowing court l could see, some forty or fifty feet
 from the ground, the top of stout
 dead wall, placed there as if to shut
 out the poverty of the Leather Lane re- zion from some better-favored district l or enclosure
 "Crickey! Arn't they tidy, jest" he
 murmured admiringly. An not a
 bloomin' penn'orth O rent!'
 As my eyes became accustomed to the dim light of the court the outlines l of curious structure grew visible. Its occupants seemed to exist under a sys- tenn of more than partial suspension. Some thirty feet from the ground a
 mass of patched bits of sail cloth and
 blankets formed the only roof. Ingen- iously braced bits of wood-fiotsam and | jetsam from the markets and the Thames-had been utilized in the con- struction of three successive stories or | floors, between the Tapping roof and l (Continuod op cevapth noro\