, with linked arms and in long rows, singing, "I may be
crazy, but I love you," "Dolly Gray," and "The Honeysuckle and the
Bee"--the last rendered something like this:-

"Yew aw the enny, ennyseckle, Oi em ther bee,
Oi'd like ter sip ther enny from those red lips, yew see."

I sat on a bench on the Thames Embankment, looking across the illuminated
water. It was approaching midnight, and before me poured the better
class of merrymakers, shunning the more riotous streets and returning
home. On the bench beside me sat two ragged creatures, a man and a
woman, nodding and dozing. The woman sat with her arms clasped across
the breast, holding tightly, her body in constant play--now dropping
forward till it seemed its balance would be overcome and she would fall
to the pavement; now inclining to the left, sideways, till her head
rested on the man's shoulder; and now to the right, stretched and
strained, till the pain of it awoke her and she sat bolt upright.
Whereupon the dropping forward would begin again and go through its cycle
till she was aroused by the strain and stretch.

Every little while boys and young men stopped long enough to go behind
the bench and give vent to sudden and fiendish shouts. This always
jerked the man and woman abruptly from their sleep; and at sight of the
startled woe upon their faces the crowd would roar with laughter as it
flooded past.

This was the most striking thing, the general heartlessness exhibited on
every hand. It is a commonplace, the homeless on the benches, the poor
miserable folk who may be teased and are harmless. Fifty thousand people
must have passed the bench while I sat upon it, and not one, on such a
jubilee occasion as the crowning of the King, felt his heart-strings
touched sufficiently to come up and say to the woman: "Here's sixpence;
go and get a bed." But the women, especially the young women, made witty
remarks upon the woman nodding, and invariably set their companions
laughing.

To use a Briticism, it was "cruel"; the corresponding Americanism was
more appropriate--it was "fierce." I confess I began to grow incensed at
this happy crowd streaming by, and to extract a sort of satisfaction from
the London statistics which demonstrate that one in every four adults is
destined to die on public charity, either in the workhouse, the
infirmary, or the asylum.

I talked with the man. He was fifty-four and a broken-down docker. He
could only find odd wor