Nowhere in the streets of London may one escape the sight of abject poverty while five minutes' walk from almost any point will bring one to a slum; but the region my hansom was now penetrating was one unending slum.  The streets were filled with a new and different race of people short of stature and of wretched or beer-sodden appearance.  We rolled along through miles of bricks and squalor and from each cross street and alley flashed long vistas of bricks and misery.  Here and there lurched a drunken man or woman and the air was obscene with sounds of jangling and squabbling.  At a market tottery old men and women were searching in the garbage thrown in the mud for rotten potatoes beans and vegetables while little children clustered like flies around a festering mass of fruit thrusting their arms to the shoulders into the liquid corruption and drawing forth morsels but partially decayed which they devoured on the spot...