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: DOWN WHITECHAPEL, FAR AWAY. tions are drawn from the street-lists of the London Post-Office Directory. Eegent Streets, Bond Streets, St. James's Streets, Pall Malls, Drury Lanes, Strands, Fleet Streets, Ludgate Hills, Covent Gardens, Cheapsides, and Waterloo Places abound in great profusion throughout the whole of the United Kingdom. There is sometimes a ludicrous incongruity between the appearance, class, and species of street familiar in London, and the synonymous street presented in a country town. A man, for instance, is apt to be puzzled when he finds a little greasy cube of ill-favoured houses, resembling a bar of soap just marked for cutting into squares figured down as Belgrave Place or Wilton Crescent. He will not be quite prepared to recognise Cheapside in a series of basket- makers' cottages with small kitchen-gardens; nor will a dirty thoroughfare, principally occupied by old clothes- vendors and marine-store-dealers, quite come up to his ideas of Bond Street or Eegent Street. Islington—composed of a long avenue of merchants' warehouses, each rejoicing in a plurality of stories, with gaping doors where there should be windows, and huge cranes from which perpetually balance sacks of meal or hogsheads of sugar after the manner of Mahomet's coffin—creates in the mind of the London-bred Islingtonian a curious dissociation of ideas. And when he comes upon a Grosvenor Street, in the guise of a blind alley, or upon a Holborn fringed with pretty suburban villas, or a Piccadilly next to a range of pigsties, or a Fleet Street planted with flowering shrubs, he cannot fail to doubt whether a street is still a street ' for a' that.' These topographical incongruities have lately been brought under my notice in the great commercial port of Liverpool. In Liverpool, which ca...