unter, in the newspapers, gentlemen who have tasted workhouse
skilly and soup, and who like it, and consider it well made and
nourishing. I meet others who account the sleeping accommodation good,
the bread excellent, and the labour demanded no more than reasonably
adequate. I should ask nothing better than to see these easily contented
gentlemen each enjoying a seventh part of my personal experience.

I may say at once that my notes of this journey were destroyed years
ago, and that I cannot tell with absolute certainty in what places
certain things happened. My experiences were challenged at the time, and
the challengers got little good by their denial of my statements. I had
hoped that my Quixotic enterprise might have some good result, but the
absurd old system has undergone no alteration.

It was in a green lane in Oxfordshire that I came across my first
travelling companion. He was a man of about sixty, a decent-looking old
fellow, and, as I found out when I got into talk with him, by trade a
tailor. He had stopped to bathe his feet in a little brook spanned by
a single arch of mossy brickwork, and whilst he cooled his feet in the
stream he rubbed his cotton socks with a bit of yellow soap the size
of half a crown. He was civil and ready to talk; but he was very
downhearted, He showed me his fingers, the tips of which were raw and
smeared with tar.

'That's this mornings work,' he said. He named the workhouse he had
stayed in. 'That's put me off earning a living for a good week to come.
A man can't sew whilst his fingers is in this state. Stone breaking's
bad enough; but when it comes to oakum-picking it's all up with work for
one while. There was another chap there last night,' he went on, as I
should take to be worse off than me. He's a watchmaker. Dressed very
nice and tidy he was, and got a job to go to in the town this morning.
He begged hard to be let off, and offered to pay for his night's
lodgings if they'd let him. They kep' him to it, hows'ever, and he did
his work, 'wouldn't ha' done it,' he concluded. 'I'd ha' gone afore the
Bench first; though that ain't mostly any good in these 'ere country
places.'

This disclosure interested me, for I myself belonged provisionally to
one of the light-fingered professions. It would be about as easy for a
compositor to earn a living fresh from oakum-picking as for a tailor
or a watchmaker; and I determined, if that task were set before me, to
plead my trade and s