with the constant rise of the foul
products of decomposition, that the pool pours
up into the air. The filth of each house
passes through a short pipe straight into this
ditch, and stays there. Upon its surface,
to our great wonder, a few consumptive-
looking ducks are swimming, very dirty;
very much like the human dwellers in foul
alleys as to their depressed and haggard
physiognomy, and to be weighed by ounces, not
by pounds. Some of them may be ducklings;
but they look as old as the most ancient
raven.

Perhaps this row of houses is a poor back
settlement—a slum of Hallsville. We go on,
and are abruptly stopped by another ditch-
full of stagnating corruption, bubbling as the
last bubbled; while, at a little distance, is
another row of houses built so that they may
pour all their solid and liquid filth into it in
the most convenient way, and receive it back
as air, with the least possible dilution. Near
those houses we find a plank by which the
ditch is crossed. There is a path across a
patch of green, and the path is, in one place,
made up of planks rotted with wet, now dried
into the soil on which they float in spongy
weather. The planks tell a tale, so does the
bloated and corrupt body of a drowned dog
that lies baking in the middle of that patch
of green. We smell the dog, we smell the
ditches, and we smell the marsh, dry as it is.
As we go on exploring, we find the same
system of building everywhere.

Rows of small houses, which may have cost
for their construction eighty pounds a-piece,
are built designedly and systematically with
their backs to the marsh ditches; which, with
one exception, are all stopped up at their
outlet; and, in many parts of their course also,
if there were an outlet, or if it could be said
that they had any course at all. Two or
three yards of clay pipe " drain " each house
into the open cess-pool under its back
windows, when it does not happen that the house
is so built as to overhang it. We feel a qualm
in calling houses built when they are laid
like band-boxes upon the soil. In winter
time every block becomes now and then an
island, and you may hear a sick man, in an
upper room, complain of water trickling
down over his bed. Then the flood cleans
the ditches, lifting all their filth into itself,
and spreading it over the land. No wonder
that the stench of the marsh in Hallsville
and Canning Town of nights, is horrible. A
fetid mist covers the ground. If you are
walking out and meet a man, you only see
him from the middle upwards, the foul ground
mist covering his legs. So says the parish
surgeon, an intelligent man and a gentleman,
by whom the day-work and the night-work
of a wide district of this character has not
been done without cost to his health. He
was himself for a time invalided by fever,
upon which ague followed. Ague, of course,
is one of the most prevalent diseases of the
district: fever abounds. When an epidemic
comes into the place, it becomes serious in its
form, and stays for months. Disease comes
upon human bodies saturated with the
influences of such air as this breathed day and
night, as a spark upon touchwood. A case
or two of small-pox caused, in spite of
vaccination, an epidemic of confluent small-pox,
which remained three or four months upon,
the spot. " I have had twenty cases of it in one
day," the doctor said. The clergyman of the
parish—whose church is beyond the reach of
the Hallsville people, but who is himself familiar
to their eyes—told us that during a half-
year, when the population of Plaistow proper
and of Hallsville were equal, he counted
the burials in each. There were sixteen
deaths in Plaistow, and in Hallsville seventy-
two.

Let us not abstain from recording the zeal
of the clergyman of this parish. In it, there
are places four miles distant from each other,
together with thousands of almost untaught
parishioners. At a time when his incumbency
was worth only one hundred and eighty
pounds a-year, in aid of which he had but
another seventy pounds a-year of private
means, he for two years and a-half paid at
the rate of one hundred a-year for a
curate's help, and struggled, by a pinch in
his own household, to relieve part of the
pinch among the poor. He was obliged,
after a long fight, to abandon his endeavour;
for he was outrunning his income, "although
living as economically as possible, making
Lent to extend considerably over forty
days." These are the clergy who support
the church; and there is only one way in
which such men usually ask the church to
support them in turn;—by giving nothing to
themselves, only more succour to the poor.
Thus, in the present case, appeal is made on
behalf of the ignorance of Hallsville and
Canning Town, inhabited by dock-labourers
and men employed in neighbouring works
and manufactories, who live surrounded by
all circumstances of degradation. The church
is far from them; churchmen are asked to
bring it nearer and in the best way, by
establishing a mission. Thus comes into life a
plea on behalf of the Plaistow and Victoria
Dock Mission. We allude to that in passing;
our concern here being with the bodily con-
dition of the people.

Though there is no church near Hallsville
or Canning Town, there is a small dissenting
chapel, to the door of which we were at-
tracted by a large placard touching the election
of a local BOARD OF HEALTH. The
Board of Health shone in such mighty
capitals, and the details as to the manner of voting
and the qualifications of the voters were
described with such circumlocution on so
large a poster, that we lost the smell of the
place out of our noses for a quarter of a
minute. Then it came back again. We walked
on a few steps and were beside another pestilential