The Mysteries of the Court of London — page 339: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

THE SECRET CHAMBER 313 turbed, and either brought up to the surface or dragged to land, and the effuvium which the troubled dike now exhaled was nauseating to a degree. Yet that was the water, or, rather, the liquid slime, which the inhabitants of Jacob’s Island had to drink and to use for all purposes of cookery or ablution, thus imbibing the seeds of disease and death from that fetid, stagnant ditch which served alike as their cistern and their sewer. Such was it at the period of which we are writing, and such is it at the present day. And then, for- sooth, we are coolly told, and, what is more, expected to believe, that the poor are cared for by the rich, and that the wretched inmates of squalid hovels, breathing the © atmosphere of pestilence and death, are an object of sym- pathy with the wealthy and the proud ones who roll in their carriages, sleep upon down, dress in fine garments, and eat off plate of silver and of gold. But to continue our narrative. After having dragged the ditch for some time without any success, the men whom Larry Sampson had sent thither for the purpose began to think that the corpse for which they were seeking must have been carried into the Thames on some occasion when the sluice-gate was open. But the experience of one who was better acquainted than the rest with Jacob’s Island. suggested that it was far more likely the corpse was deeply embedded in the mud. The men therefore attached weights to their drags, in order to make the hooks sink deep down into the slimy bed of the dike, and the result of this new experiment speedily proved successful. To be brief, the half- decomposed corpse of a female was presently dragged up from the muddy depths, and deposited upon the bridge where the men who experienced this success were stationed. We will not shock the reader by pausing to describe the loath- some appearance which the once handsome and well-formed young woman now presented to the eye. Let it be sufficient to state that the spectacle was so revolting as to fill with horror the minds of even the callous and hardened denizens of Jacob’s Island. | The corpse was conveyed into Bencull’s now deserted crib, there to await the coroner’s inquest which would be holden upon it in due course, and one of the men who had fished up the body was left in charge of it. That is to say, he locked up all the doors of the house and remained watching comicboooks (CO in