These women are known as “dress lodgers.” They are poor wretches who somehow or another are reduced to the lowest depths of destitution. Sometimes illness is the cause. Sometimes, if a girl gets into a bad house, and is as yet too new to the horrible business to conform without remonstrance to the scandalous extortions practised by the brothel-keeper, she is “broken down and brought to it” by design and scheming. A girl not long since confided to a clergyman friend of mine the following shocking story. Rendered desperate by the threats of the wretch who owned her, she applied to him for advice. “I was bad enough before, I don’t deny it; but I wasn’t a thief. I hadn’t been used to their ways for more than a month, and had a good box of clothes and a silver watch and gold chain, when I went to lodge there, and it was all very well while I spent my money like a fool, bought gin, and treated ’em all round; but when I wouldn’t stand it any longer, and told her (the brothel-keeper) plain that I would pay her the rent and no more (nine shillings a-week for a small back room), she swore that she’d break me down, and ‘bring me to her weight.’ I didn’t know that at the time; I didn’t hear of it till afterwards. She was fair enough to my face, and begged me not to leave her, flattering me, and telling me she would be ruined when her customers found out that the prettiest woman had left her. That’s how she quieted me, till one day, when I came home, she accused me of robbing a gentleman the night before of a diamond shirt-pin, and there was a fellow there who said he was a ‘detective,’ and though my box was locked he had opened it before I came home, and swore that he had found the pin, which he showed me. It was all a lie. I had been with a gentleman the night before, but he wore a scarf with a ring to it; that I could swear to. But it was no use saying anything; I was the thief, they said, and I was to be taken into custody. What was I to do? I begged of the detective not to take me; I implored Mother H— to intercede for me, and she pretended to. She went into another room with the detective, and then she came back and told me that the man would take ten pounds down to hush it up. I’ve seen that man since; he is a ‘bully’ at a bad house in the Waterloo-road, but I truly believed that he was a private-clothes policeman, as he said he was. Of course I didn’t have ten pounds, nor ten shillings hardly; but Mother H— said that she would lend the money ‘on security;’ and I made over to her—sold to her, in fact—in writing, every scrap of clothes that I had in my box and on my back. ‘Let’s have them too, Meg,’ Mother H— said, ‘and then you’re safe not to run away.’ I made over to her the box as well, and my watch, and gave her an I O U besides for five pounds, and then she ‘squared’ it with the detective, and he went off.