The Works of George W. M. Reynolds — page 244: what you’re looking at

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

LOW LIFE IN LONDON 227 The room into which they thus poured themselves was almost entirely denuded of furniture, but that from which they had emerged had the floor almost completely covered with filthy mattresses, and both had their walls and ceilings as grimy and blackened as if the whitewasher’s brush had never touched them. Old men and boys, elderly women and young girls, formed this motley group, a glance over which sent a sickening sensation to the heart. Rags and filth, the stamp of poverty and the impress of crime, misfortune and vice, ugliness and deformity in all their most revolting shapes, together with the brazen hardihood of female de- pravity, were the jumbled characteristics of this loathsome scene. ‘Now, gentlemen,’’ said the police constable, “‘is the person you want amongst these? ”’ ‘No, he is a boy of about fourteen, with a sickly appear- ance, and very sharp features,’ answered Captain Stanley, who thus had his tale ready. Significant looks were rapidly exchanged amidst the motley crew, — these looks being as much as to imply that the in- dividual so described was not anywhere upon the premises, nor was he indeed known to them, which was not astonishing, inasmuch as the pretended object of the search was of Captain Stanley’s own imaginative creation. But the visitors ob- served that a young woman, on hearing that description, disappeared from among the group, and returning into the inner room, she issued forth by a door opening into the passage. She hastened up-stairs, and a door was speedily heard to open and shut on the first landing. ‘Well, gentlemen,” said the police constable, ‘if the boy is not here, we must look into the rooms up-stairs.”’ “ You won’t find him,” said the old man who had opened the front door, and who had lingered in the passage; he was the landlord of this loathsome lodging-house. ‘ We sha’n’t take your word for it, Mr. Dyson,” said the constable, purposely assuming a decided air. ‘I know you of old, and there is not a better keeper of a padding-ken in all London than you are for stalling off us policemen.” The old man grumbled something, and the constable led the way up the staircase. The other floors were visited, and they abounded in similar specimens of lost, degraded, and demoralized humanity as those which were seen below, CONnNIELDOOKS (C(O)