Whit Monday evening I was walking along the Thames Embankment on my
way home from Waterloo Station, wet through, tired out, disappointed,
and looking forward to the dry, soft raiment, the warm, cosy room, the
excellent dinner that awaited me in my flat. I--with several others--had
been helping Campion with his annual outing of factory girls and young
hooligans. The weather, which had been perfect on Saturday, Sunday, and
when we had started, a gay and astonishing army, at seven o'clock, had
broken before ten. It had rained, dully miserable, insistently all day
long. The happy day in the New Forest had been a damp and dismal fiasco.
I was returning home, thinking I might walk off an incipient chill,
as depressed as no one but the baffled philanthropist can be, when
I perceived a tattered and dejected man sitting on a bench, a
clothes-basket between his feet, his elbows on his knees, his head in
his hands, and sobbing as if his heart would break. As the spectacle
of a grown-up man crying bitterly in a public thoroughfare was somewhat
remarkable, I paused, and then in order to see whether his distress was
genuine, and also not to arouse his suspicions, I threw myself in an
exhausted manner on the bench beside him. He continued to sob. At last I
said, raising my voice:

"You seem to be pretty miserable. What's wrong?"

He turned bleared, yet honest-looking eyes upon me.

"The whole blasted show!" said he. "There's nothing right in it, s'welp
me Gawd."

I gave a modified assent to the proposition and drew my coat-collar over
my eyes. "Being wet through doesn't make it any better," said I.

"Who would ha' thought it would come down as it has to-day? Tell me
that. It's enough to make a man cut his throat!"

I was somewhat surprised. "You're not in such a great distress just
because it has been a rainy day!"

"Ain't I just!" he exclaimed. "It's been and gone and ruined me, this
day has. Look 'ere, guv'nor, I'll tell you all about it. I've been out
of work, see? I was in 'orspital for three months and I couldn't get
nothing regular to do when I come out. I'm a packer by trade. I did odd
jobs, see, and the wife she earned a little, too, and we managed to keep
things going and to scrape together five shillings, that's three months'
savings, against Whitsun Bank Holiday. And as the weather was so fine,
I laid it all out in paper windmills to sell to the kids on 'Amstead
'Eath. And I started out this morning with the basket