“Lushing Loo” was a name uneuphemistic, and calculated to prejudice the hearer against the possessor. I had only glanced at her before, and a careful scrutiny surprised me, while it impressed me in her favour. She was lady-like in appearance, although haggard. She was not dressed in flaring colours and meretricious tawdry. Her clothes were neat, and evidenced taste in their selection, although they were cheap. I spoke to her; she looked up without giving me an answer, appearing much dejected. Guessing the cause, which was that she had been very drunk the night before, and had come to the public-house to get something more, but had been unable to obtain credit, I offered her half-a-crown, and told her to get what she liked with it. A new light came into her eyes; she thanked me, and, calling the barmaid, gave her orders, with a smile of triumph. Her taste was sufficiently aristocratic to prefer pale brandy to the usual beverage dispensed in gin-palaces. A “drain of pale,” as she termed it, invigorated her. Glass after glass was ordered, till she had spent all the money I gave her. By this time she was perfectly drunk, and I had been powerless to stop her. Pressing her hand to her forehead, she exclaimed, “Oh, my poor head!” I asked what was the matter with her, and for the first time she condescended, or felt in the humour to speak to me. “My heart’s broken,” she said. “It has been broken since the twenty-first of May. I wish I was dead; I wish I was laid in my coffin. It won’t be long first. I am doing it. I’ve just driven another nail in, and ‘Lushing Loo,’ as they call me, will be no loss to society. Cheer up; let’s have a song. Why don’t you sing?” she cried, her mood having changed, as is frequently the case with habitual drunkards, and a symptom that often precedes delirium tremens. “Sing, I tell you,” and she began,

The first I met a cornet was
In a regiment of dragoons,
I gave him what he didn’t like,
And stole his silver spoons.

When she had finished her song, the first verse of which is all I can remember, she subsided into comparative tranquillity. I asked her to tell me her history.

“Oh, I’m a seduced milliner,” she said, rather impatiently; “anything you like.”

It required some inducement on my part to make her speak, and overcome the repugnance she seemed to feel at saying any thing about herself.

She was the daughter of respectable parents, and at an early age had imbibed a fondness for a cousin in the army, which in the end caused her ruin. She had gone on from bad to worse after his desertion, and at last found herself among the number of low transpontine women. I asked her why she did not enter a refuge, it might save her life.

“I don’t wish to live,” she replied. “I shall soon get D. T., and then I’ll kill myself in a fit of madness.”

Nevertheless I gave her the address of the secretary of the Midnight Meeting Association, Red Lion Square, and was going away when a young Frenchmen entered the bar, shouting a French song, beginning and I left him in conversation with the girl, whose partiality for the brandy bottle had gained her the suggestive name I have mentioned above.

Vive l’amour, le vin, et le tabac,

The people who keep the low lodging-houses where these women live, are rapacious, mean, and often dishonest. They charge enormously for their rooms in order to guarantee themselves against loss in the event of their harbouring a “bunter” by mistake, so that the money paid by their honest lodgers covers the default made by those who are fraudulent.

Dr. Ryan, in his book on prostitution, puts the following extraordinary passage, whilst writing about low houses:—

“An enlightened medical gentleman assured me that near what is called the Fleet Ditch almost every house is the lowest and most infamous brothel. There is an aqueduct of large dimensions, into which murdered bodies are precipitated by bullies and discharged at a considerable distance into the Thames, without the slightest chance of recovery.”

Mr.