nce every week to
have me taught to write and spell, together with arithmetic, grammar,
history and other things. This rather uncertain method of education
went on for about two years. I was getting on fine, and absorbing
everything I was taught with great rapidity, when my one friend, who
had provided the night school education, departed to another world
where I always hope he found the conditions easier than the one he had
left. I might have been at my miserable home in the slums with the man
and woman for years after this, only a curious form of providence was
working upon my behalf.

"It had been a bad night for selling papers, I had a few coppers only,
and my heart sank down when I approached the hovel where we all lived.
The man and woman were quarrelling violently. As I slunk in white of
face and with a terrible quaking feeling inside me, I saw at once the
man was worse than he had ever been, and as I entered the door of the
squalid room he struck the woman an awful blow, then he saw me. He
grabbed me, and I think might have killed me that night, but I wrenched
myself away after he had given me the first blows; he pursued me,
catching at my coat, which at the best of times was only rags; he tore
part of the coat away, which was left in his hand, and I ran for dear
life. The man was mad and didn't know what he was doing, maybe, but
the only thing he could lay his hands upon was a broken brandy bottle;
he hurled this at my head. It struck me as I reached the street and
cut the back of my head open. Although I was hurt I staggered on. I
was dizzy and sick and the blood was dripping all over my shirt, but
though I swayed about I never stopped, I would go anywhere away from
the horror of that place. I never meant to go back there again.

"The next thing I remember was some sort of Square, which I had never
seen until then, for I had never gone so far West in London before.
There was nobody about, and I sank down beside a sort of stone thing
and held my head, which hurt me horribly, and began to cry, I think.

"I was only about ten or eleven years old at that time, if as much, for
no record of my age had ever been kept. Whether it was the pain, or
simply fright because the few clothes I had were covered in blood from
the wound in my head where the bottle had cut me, I don't know, but
there is no doubt that I lost consciousness, probably for some
considerable time. When I came to myself and woke up, it mus