are not used to crowding in the way the others
do. We need more room. The others, the foreigners and lower-class
people, can get five and six families into this house, where we only get
one. So they can pay more rent for the house than we can afford. It
_is_ shocking, sir; and just to think, only a few years ago all this
neighbourhood was just as nice as it could be."

I looked at her. Here was a woman, of the finest grade of the English
working-class, with numerous evidences of refinement, being slowly
engulfed by that noisome and rotten tide of humanity which the powers
that be are pouring eastward out of London Town. Bank, factory, hotel,
and office building must go up, and the city poor folk are a nomadic
breed; so they migrate eastward, wave upon wave, saturating and degrading
neighbourhood by neighbourhood, driving the better class of workers
before them to pioneer, on the rim of the city, or dragging them down, if
not in the first generation, surely in the second and third.

It is only a question of months when Johnny Upright's street must go. He
realises it himself.

"In a couple of years," he says, "my lease expires. My landlord is one
of our kind. He has not put up the rent on any of his houses here, and
this has enabled us to stay. But any day he may sell, or any day he may
die, which is the same thing so far as we are concerned. The house is
bought by a money breeder, who builds a sweat shop on the patch of ground
at the rear where my grapevine is, adds to the house, and rents it a room
to a family. There you are, and Johnny Upright's gone!"

And truly I saw Johnny Upright, and his good wife and fair daughters, and
frowzy slavey, like so many ghosts flitting eastward through the gloom,
the monster city roaring at their heels.

But Johnny Upright is not alone in his flitting. Far, far out, on the
fringe of the city, live the small business men, little managers, and
successful clerks. They dwell in cottages and semi-detached villas, with
bits of flower garden, and elbow room, and breathing space. They inflate
themselves with pride, and throw out their chests when they contemplate
the Abyss from which they have escaped, and they thank God that they are
not as other men. And lo! down upon them comes Johnny Upright and the
monster city at his heels. Tenements spring up like magic, gardens are
built upon, villas are divided and subdivided into many dwellings, and
the black night of London sett