The Mysteries of Modern London

|THE crimes of London are the crimes of humanity plus those of a great city. There are amateur criminals and professional criminals. The amateur criminal is the man or woman who...

|EVERY now and then the world is startled by the story of a woman who has succeeded in obtaining thousands of pounds from men of the world and men of business who have believed...

|IF to-morrow we were to read that the whole of the inmates of some great metropolitan lunatic asylum had escaped, and were still at large, the inhabitants of London would be se...

|EVERY year a certain number of men and women disappear suddenly from their homes, from their accustomed haunts, from the circle of their friends and acquaintances. Without caus...

|IT is six o'clock on Sunday evening. It has been a wild, wet, February day, but with the twilight the rain has ceased, and a mist has come up from the river, wrapping the East...

|IT is eleven o'clock on Sunday morning, and the church bells have just ceased ringing. Along the broad thoroughfare which is one of the main arteries of London a few belated wo...

|THERE are streets and squares and terraces in London which have been renamed in order that they may no longer be associated in the public mind with the dark deeds of which they...

But even in the shadows and silent places lurk the mysteries of humanity. The lords of life and death look down upon a drama that is played. The sentinel stars keep watch over a...

Under the humblest roofs in this great city of ours men and women are daily writing in the book of life beautiful stories of tender love, of noble self-sacrifice, of deeds of he...

|A THIN mist wraps London in a shroud of grey this dismal winter afternoon as we pick our path carefully along the miry roads and sodden footways that lead us to the gloomy litt...

|ONE half of the world does not know how the other half lives." That is a stock phrase which has been worn threadbare by over-use. And if you analyse it, it appears so self-evid...

|Fortune has smiled upon the happy favourites of the footlights. Never was the glamour of the stage more powerful than it is to-day; never were young men and young women more ea...

_The inquest and the garden party--A policeman sits behind the screen--The portrait of a prosperous impostor--From his wife's death-bed to the House--The judge and his pet dog--...

|IN the whirl of the world's news, the hurricane of happenings, the rush of events, the impression made upon the public mind by the dramas and tragedies of everyday life is boun...

|A MYSTERY is, in a popular sense, that which cannot be easily explained; a circumstance that cannot be readily accounted for. Something is, but how or why we cannot tell. The m...

|IN the days of romance the Secret Chamber was part of every mansion that had any claim to antiquity. Every old castle, every nobleman's seat, had in it a room which could be us...

|NOT very long ago a high dignitary of the Church stood in the witness-box while his brother stood in the dock. Human endurance had come to an end, and the well-known divine had...

|SCATTERED over London is a small army of spies and informers, men and women, whose business--sometimes whose pleasure--it is to make communications to the authorities with rega...

The homes of mystery and romance lie often at our very doors, unknown and unexpected. We pass a scene that the novelist or the dramatist could turn to thrilling account, and to...

_Slums in the gilded West--"It's the place! It's ruin to us all"--Where the children earn and the mothers drink--How the "till sneak" works--Lynch law in London--A slump depress...

|THERE is a mask that most of us wear occasionally. It is not always politic to show ourselves to the world exactly as we are. People of the highest respectability, of the most...

|WHEN the interior of a house is set upon the stage, the offers harbourage to the fair frail craft that almost at the outset show signs of the storm through which they have pass...

|THERE is one phase in the mystery of life in the great City which I would gladly pass. But it is one of the strangest, one of the least known, and it is impossible to ignore it.

|AS the world knows nothing of its greatest men, so the world knows nothing of its greatest mysteries. No hint or rumour of them ever reaches the public ear. There are strange t...