the time to
spare, and when they do there is great waste of time and energy on the
journey. My plan is the only really practicable one, and as I have both
means, time, and inclination, I should be a thief and a murderer if I
withheld what I so evidently owe." In the autumn of 1867 he carried out
his resolve, and took lodgings in the heart of the parish which I
sketched in the opening of this paper. If any romantic dreams had mixed
with his resolution they at once faded away before the dull, commonplace
reality. "I saw nothing very striking at Stepney," is his first comment
on the sphere he had chosen. But he was soon satisfied with his choice.
He took up in a quiet, practical way the work he found closest at hand.
"All is yet in embryo, but it will grow. Just now I only teach in a
night school, and do what in me lies in looking after the sick, keeping
an eye upon nuisances and the like, seeing that the local authorities
keep up to their work. I go to-morrow before the Board at the workhouse
to compel the removal to the infirmary of a man who ought to have been
there already. I shall drive the sanitary inspector to put the Act
against overcrowding in force." Homely work of this sort grows on him;
we see him in these letters getting boys out to sea, keeping school with
little urchins,--"demons of misrule" who tried his temper,--gathering
round him a class of working men, organizing an evening club for boys.
All this, too, quietly and unostentatiously and with as little resort as
possible to "cheap charity," as he used to call it, to the "doles of
bread and meat which only do the work of poor-rates."

So quiet and simple indeed was his work that though it went on in the
parish of which I then had the charge it was some little time before I
came to know personally the doer of it. It is amusing even now to
recollect my first interview with Edward Denison. A vicar's Monday
morning is never the pleasantest of awakenings, but the Monday morning
of an East-end vicar brings worries that far eclipse the mere headache
and dyspepsia of his rural brother. It is the "parish morning." All the
complicated machinery of a great ecclesiastical, charitable, and
educational organization has got to be wound up afresh, and set going
again for another week. The superintendent of the Women's Mission is
waiting with a bundle of accounts, complicated as only ladies' accounts
can be. The churchwarden has come with a face full of gloom to consult
o