Previously, however, to entering the vehicle, the thoughtful Tom Rain purchased some of the very best cakes which a shop in such a neighbourhood could produce; and, though the little boy kept sobbing as he repeated to himself, "Mamma is dead,"—for he was too young to understand that she had denied this maternity with her dying breath,—yet he ate greedily of the food—for he was famished.
Rainford said but little to him, beyond a few occasional cheering and consolatory words, as they rode along, because the heavy rumbling of the vehicle rendered it difficult to hear what was uttered within.
In about three-quarters of an hour the coach stopped at the Elephant and Castle; and Rainford, conducting the boy tenderly by the hand, plunged into the maze of streets which form a neighbourhood requiring a detailed description.
Any one who is acquainted with that part of London, or who, with the map of the great metropolis before him, takes the trouble to follow us in this portion of our narrative, will understand us when we state that, almost immediately behind the Elephant and Castle tavern, there is a considerable district totally _unexplored_ by thousands and thousands of persons dwelling in other parts of the English capital. This district is now bounded on the north by the New Kent Road, on the east by the Kent or Greenwich Road, on the south by Walworth, and on the west by the Walworth Road. Built upon a low, damp, and unhealthy soil, the dwellings of the poor there throng in frightful abundance,—forming narrow streets half choked up with dirt, miserable alleys where the very air is stagnant, and dark courts, to enter which seems like going into the fœtid vault of a church. Many of the streets, that appear to have been huddled together without any architectural plan, but merely upon a studied system of crowding together as many hovels as possible, have their back windows looking upon ditches, the black mire and standing water of which exhale vapours sufficiently noxious to breed a pestilence. When the sun shines upon these noisome ditches, their surface displays a thousand prismatic hues, thrown out by the decomposing offal and putrid vegetables which have been emptied into those open sewers. But sewers they cannot be called—for instead of carrying off the filth of the neighbourhood, those ditches preserve it stagnant.