mp into the Thames, and cut the tenancy short.

It was not a room. Courtesy to the language will no more permit it to be
called a room than it will permit a hovel to be called a mansion. It was
a den, a lair. Seven feet by eight were its dimensions, and the ceiling
was so low as not to give the cubic air space required by a British
soldier in barracks. A crazy couch, with ragged coverlets, occupied
nearly half the room. A rickety table, a chair, and a couple of boxes
left little space in which to turn around. Five dollars would have
purchased everything in sight. The floor was bare, while the walls and
ceiling were literally covered with blood marks and splotches. Each mark
represented a violent death--of an insect, for the place swarmed with
vermin, a plague with which no person could cope single-handed.

The man who had occupied this hole, one Dan Cullen, docker, was dying in
hospital. Yet he had impressed his personality on his miserable
surroundings sufficiently to give an inkling as to what sort of man he
was. On the walls were cheap pictures of Garibaldi, Engels, Dan Burns,
and other labour leaders, while on the table lay one of Walter Besant's
novels. He knew his Shakespeare, I was told, and had read history,
sociology, and economics. And he was self-educated.

On the table, amidst a wonderful disarray, lay a sheet of paper on which
was scrawled: _Mr. Cullen, please return the large white jug and
corkscrew I lent you_--articles loaned, during the first stages of his
sickness, by a woman neighbour, and demanded back in anticipation of his
death. A large white jug and a corkscrew are far too valuable to a
creature of the Abyss to permit another creature to die in peace. To the
last, Dan Cullen's soul must be harrowed by the sordidness out of which
it strove vainly to rise.

It is a brief little story, the story of Dan Cullen, but there is much to
read between the lines. He was born lowly, in a city and land where the
lines of caste are tightly drawn. All his days he toiled hard with his
body; and because he had opened the books, and been caught up by the
fires of the spirit, and could "write a letter like a lawyer," he had
been selected by his fellows to toil hard for them with his brain. He
became a leader of the fruit-porters, represented the dockers on the
London Trades Council, and wrote trenchant articles for the labour
journals.

He did not cringe to other men, even though they were his e