pestilential ditch, bubbling as if there were a
miraculous draught of fishes just below. A
row of houses was arranged with little back
yards dipping into it; and, in one of the back-
yards, three ghostly little children lying on
the ground, hung with their faces over it,
breathing the poison of the bubbles as it rose,
and fishing about with their hands in the
filth for something—perhaps for something
nice to eat.

We went to the old national school, a small
wooden lean-to, built at the side of the
last house in an unfinished row. The poor
in Rotherhithe, aud here too, describe any
line of very crazy cottages as Rabbit-hutch
Row. The old Hallsville national school is
certainly a sort of rabbit-hutch; and not a
large hutch either. When it was first knocked
up, there were but thirty houses in this part
of the marsh, and accommodation was
required for but eleven scholars. The new town
grew rapidly, and there were no means of
building a new school; so that, at last, one
might see the mistress on a wet day, with
her umbrella up, teaching a hundred children
in the dripping hutch. We are told that
there have been one hundred and seventy
scholars crammed into it; although, if it were
a fowl-house, nobody would suppose it
able to accommodate that number of fowls.
By fortune, a long room, built by a publican
as an American bowling-alley for dock
labourers and sailors, was bowled down as
an alley and set up again as a new national
school. It is spacious and clean. The sky-
lights open and secure sufficient ventilation.
There is a ditchfull of filth sleeping at full
length (we must not say running) along one
side of the building, and it branches into
another ditch of the same character that
stinks immediately under the back window;
which, therefore, is a closed shutter and no
window at all. Over the two ditches, at the
place where they meet, a wooden house is
built; it seems by its form to have been
constructed as a pleasure-house on the ground
of the publican who speculated in the
bowling-green. But now it is a home. The
white blind was down, at the window.
Was there death as well as deadly air
inside?

Of course the ditches were inevitable to
the school; for there is no escaping them in
Hallsville or Canning Town. The local Board
of Health appears, from answers made to
inquiries, to care more about Stratford, where
its members live, than about colonies out in the
marsh. On the occasion of our first visit,
however, the board had been active; for we
learnt that a ton of deodorising matter had
been recently scattered about the vilest pools.
The stench, when we paid our second visit,
was unmitigated.

Two years ago, when application was made
by more than a tenth of the rate-payers of
the parish of West Ham for an inquiry into
the sanitary condition of the district, with a
view to bringing it under the conditions of
the Public Health Act, Mr. Alfred Dickens
was the civil engineer sent by the general
Board of Health as an inspector. His report
and the evidence at his inquiry is before us
as we write, and it dwells very much upon
the state of CanningTown and Hallsville. We
learn from this report that the area of the
ditches in the parish amounted to not less
than one hundred and forty acres, according
to a surveyor's book upwards of thirty-five
years old, and that area has been increased
by side-cuttings at the railway and new
cuttings of open sewer. Disease had cost the
parish six hundred pounds in the year
previous to the inquiry. There was then, of
course, as now, no drainage or paving in
Canning Town; the roads in winter were
impassable; but the inhabitants were paying
(for what they did not get) an eighteen-penny
rate under the Commissioners' Act, not for
works done in accordance with it, but " for
the expenses of the act." Also, although the
parish did not take charge of their roads,
they were paying a highway rate for the
parishioners elsewhere. One horrible detail
in Mr. Dickens's report has, happily, to be
omitted from our sketch. Two years ago,
there was in Hallsville and Canning Town
no water supply. Good water is now laid
on. In all other respects, the old offences
against civilised life cleave to the district.
The local Board of Health which the
inhabitants of the parish sought and obtained,
whatever it may have done for Stratford,
seems to have done nothing for Hallsville,
unless it be considered something to
indulge it with an odd pinch of deodorising
powder.

Canning Town is the child of the Victoria
Docks. The condition of this place and of
its neighbour prevents the steadier class of
mechanics from residing in it. They go from
their work to Stratford or to Plaistow. Many
select such a dwelling-place because they are
already debased below the point of enmity to
filth; poorer labourers live there, because
they cannot afford to go farther, and there
become debased. The Dock Company is
surely, to a very great extent, answerable for
the condition of the town they are creating.
Not a few of the houses in it are built by
poor and ignorant men who have saved a
hundred pounds, and are deluded by the
prospect of a fatally cheap building investment.
But who was it that named one row
of these houses Montesquieu Place? We
should like to see in Canning Town some of
the engineering works suggested by a place
where on one spot you may pass out of
Arkwright Street into Brunel Street and turn
your back upon Graves Terrace. Was it an
undertaker who had made his money in these
parts, and spent it in a profitable investment
upon houses that would further freshen up
his trade, who built Graves Terrace in
Canning Town?