Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: ONLY A MONGREL ‘ He liveth best who loveth best All things, both great and small.’ S. T. Colerldge. When I first made the acquaintance of Mongrel Town, as an aimless, wandering London stroller, I was prepared for a little misconception as to my object and character. I got it. A thin, dirty, barefooted, sharp, terrier-like urchin? healthy in body from living in the open air, not being over-gorged with food, and being always on the move?‘ spotted’ me from the dilapidated door of a squat house, dying of premature old age and ‘ Jerry’ rheumatics. This boy thought proper to warn the inmates by shouting, ‘ Mother! git under the bed! 'Ere’s the tallyman a-comin !’ This was hardly a compliment, but it might have been worse. I have been taken before now for a tax-collector. Mongrel Town is not a sightly settlement. In the old Dickens days it would have borne half a yard of descriptive writing. Now people are in a greater hurry, and read as they run. They take their literature in wafers and essences, their newspaper leaders in paragraphs, and their novels in the form of intellectual ‘ meat extracts.’ Mongrel Town was proud of one thing?its gas-works. It had the largest gasometer in the world. This was its cathedral, its town- hall, its market-place, its monument. Fortunately it was never much troubled with tourists. Outside the gas-works stretched a waste of swampy land, dotted here and there with small strips of garden ground, devoted mostly to the cultivation of sooty vegetables, and adorned occasionally with lop-sided, narrow huts, made of old wood and tarred canvas, and called summer-houses. A few hillocks of ashes and dust-contractors’ refuse relieved the Dutch flatness of the ground, and formed a half-mourning avenue to the river. The Thames at this point evident…