The Mysteries of the Court of London — page 254: what you’re looking at

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THE MYSTERIES OF Tiiu OOTRT. “Don’t be afeard, my lady—depend upon it I she’n’t mention a word of what you say when I see Chiffin——That is, if I ever do see him again ; for he is very likely to get out of the country.” “IT thmk not: for from what those people said down in the bar, he does not even seem to be sus- pected. Has there been any pursuit after him ?”’ “Not that I can learn, please your ladyship,” re- plied Patch. “I do not think the detectives has | dwellings, to mingle with the hot atmosphere uf rooms where the poor lay huddled together in herd- | like masses, or to render more fetid still the faverish air in the chamber of the invalid. : No wonder, then, that Lady Bess recoiled at first from the very approaches to that pandemonium of noxious odours: but the next instant conquering ‘ her repugnance when she considered the important object she had in view, she continued her way, g-t on the right scent. But won't your ladyship | literally battling however against the rolling vapours tare surnmut? Yon look all pale and no-how.” “ No—nothing,” she answered petulantly. “You | had thus k-vrw I never drink.” “Yes, my lady, I know that you have none of them emall wices.” She was moving towards the door of the little asif they were the billows of a strong tide which she courageously to breast. Dimly through the mephitic exhalations did the lights burn in the | wretched houses on either side of this alley; and ' the shouts of drunken revelry, the cries of quarrel- | ling women, the imprecations of brutal husbands, sordid-looking apartment, when suddenly recollect- | and the ecreams of ill-treated wives, blended in hor- ing the object of her coming, she turned and said, “T had weil nigh forgotten why I called. Do k-ow the whereaboute of a man named Shakerly P” “ What, old Bob Shakerly ?” ejaculated Solomon. “Toha sure I do. He was once a body-snatcher: row he’s a knacker and makes catemeat and sas- exges. It’s down at Cow Cross, Smithfield. Your ladyship can’t mistake: anybody will tell you Bob ELakorly’s yard.” . “Put up my horse till I return,” said Lady Bess. “I do not like to ride him into London :”—and having thus given her orders, she quitted the room, descended the stairs, and issued from the house; but 33 those who stood af the bar y made way for her, as she was held in the light of something very superior at the low boozing-ken, they could not Emerging from Agar Town, Lady Bees obtained e cab at the nearest stand, and jumping in, ordered the driver to proceed to Cow Cross. During the half-hour which the journey ocoupied, her whole thoughts were bent upon this diabolical murder of which she had just heard, and which had filled her “mith so profound a horror. Were her heart analysed at that moment, it might perhaps have been found that a remorse had arisen there for the adoption of thet course of life which had thrown her in the way cf auch human reptiles as Chiffin, and compelled har to make use of them for her purposes. On reaching the foul nei of Cow Cross, Lady Bess descended from the cab, bade the driver wait, and proceeded to inquire for one Bob Shakerly. We seemed to be as well known in that vicinity as an alderman in his ward; and she was forthwith circcted to a narrow alley at the extremity of which she would find a knacker’s yard. Scarcely had she entered the lane, when her nose was saluted by s0 fetid a stench that she recoiled for a moment from farther encounter with the pestiferous exhalation. It was a horrible smell of corrupt flesh and mouldy bones, mingling with the sickly steam from cauldrons in which the anatomised animals were secthing down. None save those who have been so unfortu- nate as to venture upon the confines of « knacker’s yard, can possibly conceive the horrible nausea pro- duced by theses blended effluvia: it was enough to make the storeach heave and become sick. It was an odour, indeed, that was not only fetid and sickly, but pungent and penetrating as well,—an odour the peetiferous miasma of which one might rible discordancy. Altogether, it was a neighbour- you | hood which, existing in the very heart of the capita: of civilization, was « disgrace to civilisation itech’! Lady Bess passed onward, and reaching the end of the alley, found herself at an open gateway, reveal- ing a full view of a spacious yard surrvunded by tumble-down sheds and wooden buildings, from several of which the strong light of fires threw a lurid glow into the open space. All the frontages of these buildings gleamed ghastly in that light with the bleaching bones of anixnals hung up to dy. A glance into the places where the fires were lizhted, showed Lady Bess large cauldrons in which the horse-flesh was boiling; and now that she was so neay as to be within reach of the volumes of va- pour which rolled away from these cauldrons, the odour became dimost stifling in its nauseating in- tensity. It seemed as if it was an odour that could be felt—that clung around you—adhered to you-- stuck to you like a thick and clammy substanse— making you feel dirty all over, and long to hasten away to put off and eschew for ever the garments thus impregnated with the feculent efluvium. Heaped up in the corners of the yard were puiri- fying masses of the entrails and offals of the slaugh- tered horses‘ pools of blood darkened the ground in many places—and ever and anon the foot slipped . over some slimy substance, such as clotted gore cr rotting pieces of flesh, so that a horrible shudder . shot upward through the entire frame and the heart | heaved as ifrising to the very throat. A cart atono | extremity, resting slantwise on its shafts, contained a dead horse that had beet recently brought in ; and in one of the sheds were four or five living —_ = horses, huddled together in a space not more than of . sufficient dimensions for one. These poor brutes | were starving—yes, literally starving: they were the merest things of skin and bone that ever managed to retain a particle of vitality—and per- haps they were goaded to a keener sense of that last spark of life by the pangs of famine. Such was the knacker’s yard! And this horrible spot, with its nauseating odours, its accumulated filth and feculence, and its instances of hideous cruelty to poor worn-out animals, was only one amongst several replete with kindred abominations in that neighbourhood. There they were, in the midés of one of the most densely populated quarters of Lon- don—hotbeds of feculence and corruption, ready te blase up with gunpowder offect into all the devastat- expect to take away in une’s clothes,—an odour that ‘ing horrors of plague and pestilence. And there, too, eould not fail to pierce into ali ‘he surrounding | bey are now at the present day,—preparing a rich et LT ECOMRRICLO© (C <SEGOin