HE HOME OF OUR ANGEVIN KINGS 359

CAPRI 383

CAPRI AND ITS ROMAN REMAINS 395

THE FEAST OF THE CORAL-FISHERS 414

A BROTHER OF THE POOR.

There are few stiller things than the stillness of a summer's noon such
as this, a summer's noon in a broken woodland, with the deer asleep in
the bracken, and the twitter of birds silent in the coppice, and hardly
a leaf astir in the huge beeches that fling their cool shade over the
grass. Afar off a gilded vane flares out above the grey Jacobean gables
of Knoll, the chime of a village clock falls faintly on the ear, but
there is no voice or footfall of living thing to break the silence as I
turn over leaf after leaf of the little book I have brought with me from
the bustle of town to this still retreat, a book that is the record of a
broken life, of a life "broken off," as he who lived it says of another,
"with a ragged edge."

It is a book that carries one far from the woodland stillness around
into the din and turmoil of cities and men, into the misery and
degradation of "the East-end,"--that "London without London," as some
one called it the other day. Few regions are more unknown than the Tower
Hamlets. Not even Mrs. Riddell has ventured as yet to cross the border
which parts the City from their weltering mass of busy life, their
million of hard workers packed together in endless rows of monotonous
streets, broken only by shipyard or factory or huge breweries, streets
that stretch away eastward from Aldgate to the Essex marshes. And yet,
setting aside the poetry of life which is everywhere, there is poetry
enough in East London; poetry in the great river which washes it on the
south, in the fretted tangle of cordage and mast that peeps over the
roofs of Shadwell or in the great hulls moored along the wharves of
Wapping; poetry in the "Forest" that fringes it to the east, in the few
glades that remain of Epping and Hainault,--glades ringing with the
shouts of school-children out for their holiday and half mad with
delight at the sight of a flower or a butterfly; poetry of the present
in the work and toil of these acres of dull bricks and mortar where
everybody, man woman and child, is a worker, this England without a
"leisure class"; poetry in the thud of the steam-engine and the white
trail of steam from the tall sugar refinery, in the blear eyes of the
Sp