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the most effective course would be to visit some of the unpleasant institutions I knew of, in which the dark engineers of the underworld convened to discuss their business and unburden their minds in fellowship. Such a place was a gin shop on Little Warner Street, near Hockley-in-the-Hole—a place equally repulsive to the senses of smell and sight, for it was so close to that fetid sewer known as the Fleet Ditch that it was not uncommon for the entire place to be flooded with the sickening scent of kennel and waste. This gin house had no proper name, and the sign above it was merely a faded image of two horses drawing a cart—a remnant of a previous shop. Among its patrons, the house was known as Bawdy Moll’s, for its proprietress was an affectionate and buxom woman whose onset of middle years she combated with an excess of concupiscence and a minimum of attire.
    I entered Bawdy Moll’s in the early afternoon; the place was then far less inhabited than in the busy nighttime hours, when impoverished men sought refuge from their lives in pints of gin sold for almost nothing. A penny or two was enough to transport the most miserable of sods to a painless realm of drunken oblivion. In the afternoon, however, the shop served a more sporadic sort—perhaps the petty thief or pickpocket seeking refuge from a job turned sour, the beggar who had chosen to surrender his pennies for drink rather than food, or the out-of-work laborer who preferred to face a senseless stupor rather than a heartless London that would care not a whit for his starvation.
    There were also the visitors who came each Monday and Thursday to see the bullbaiting. On other days one could find a variety of different exhibits to be seen in Hockley-in-the-Hole. In my younger years, I had been one of them, for before I had taken to fighting exclusively with my fists, I had been part of a troupe of sword-fighters who demonstrated for paying crowds the noble art of self-defense. Such things are no longer seen today, but as a young man I had marched about the city amidst a troop of fighters clad in our poor and tattered estimation of military uniforms, drums a-beating, while boys passed around handbills detailing the thrills of our shows. During my days sword-fighting at a ramshackle outdoor theater near Oxford Street, I would risk life and limb with another man as we demonstrated our daring skill with our swords, each of us trying to best his opponent without doing him any serious harm. Despite our efforts to spare one another, I was usually bloodied and covered with cuts by the end of a performance, and I have many a scar upon my body to testify to these exploits. When the theatrical manager asked me if I wished to earn my bread by fighting with fists only, I confess I was delighted at the prospect of so painless an employment.
    I suppose I was prone to reminisce about those awful times, but the gin house quickly reminded me of what life engendered in that part of town. Bawdy Moll’s had few windows, for her patrons had no wish to see the world around them, and they had less of a wish for the world outside to look in. I braced myself against the stink as I saw Bawdy Moll, who stood behind the counter talking excitedly with a haggard-looking cutpurse whose name I knew but whose acquaintance I had never sought. They both hovered over a pile of papers that from where I stood I recognized as tickets for the illegal lottery that Moll, like so many tavern-owners in that part of the city, ran from her place of business. The drawings were always biased, rigged, and small, and the revenue from them added handsomely to Moll’s purse.
    Moll wore her hair high, in a grotesque parody of the ladies’ fashion. Her dress opened wide at the neck to reveal an ample if withered bosom, and the paint upon her face bespoke a woman who believed these artificial and conspicuous colorings had power not to deceive but to blind, for her skin put me in mind of bark ready to drop from the