ling in her weekly subscription to the
funeral club, so that her husband was happy in the knowledge that no
pauper funeral awaited him. She was barely sixty-two herself, and had
managed very well these thirty years and more, and trusted, with
thanks, that she would manage to the end without charity.

Argument was futile. So the lady and gentleman drove away with their
bright sovereigns; and when my next removal came the old woman was
still at her tub, the other two helpless ones still on their beds, and
living yet. One need not consider the wild unwisdom of it; but in the
astounding courage and endurance of it, I hold there is lesson and
ensample for the bravest man in British history. And among the working
poor such incidents cannot be very rare, because I knew of quite a
number in my very brief experience.

That the England from whose loins such master men and women have
sprung should have bred also the festering spawn of human vermin that
litters many of the mean streets of London, aye, and the seats in its
parks and gardens, is a tragic humiliation; an indictment, too, as I
see it. Charity may cover a multitude of sins. It can never cover this
running sore; or, if it should ever cover it completely, so much the
worse; for I swear it can never heal, cleanse, or remove it. Nothing
sentimental, personal, and voluntary, nothing sporadic and spasmodic
can ever accomplish that. And to approach it with bleatings about the
will of the people, universal suffrage, old age, or any other kind of
pension, dole, or the like, is to be guilty of a cruel and
contemptible kind of mockery.

V

Looking back across the long succession of crowded years upon the
period of my struggle to obtain a foothold in the London world of
journalism and literature, I see a certain amount of pathos, some
bathos, and something too in the way of steadfast, unmercenary
endurance, which is not altogether unworthy of respect.

In my humble opinion a foothold in that world was at least rather
better worth having in those days than it is to-day for a thinking man
of literary instincts. It was certainly vastly harder to obtain, in
the absence of any influence or assistance from established friends.

Of late years I have met representatives of a type of young journalist
which had not yet come into existence when I arrived in London. In
those days (when the published price of novels was still 31s. 6d., and
halfpenny dailies were unknown) there were t