she kept the strictest watch over our morality.

Sometimes on a Sunday evening the ministers of the Baptist chapel would
come in to supper after the meeting. The elder was a silver-haired old
man, who loved me; and I loved him, too, for there were always lollipops
in his pocket for me and for my only sister Susan. The other was a
younger man, tall and dark. He preached a harsher doctrine than his
gentler colleague, and was much the greater favourite at the chapel. I
hated him; and years later he married my sister.

When I had turned thirteen, my father's brother, who had risen in
wealth, and now was the owner of a first-rate grocery business in the
City and a pleasant villa at Herne Hill, and had a son preparing for
Cambridge, came to visit us. When he had gone my mother told me, very
solemnly and slowly, that I was to be sent to a tailor's workrooms the
next day.

What could my uncle make me but a tailor--or a shoemaker? A pale,
consumptive boy, all forehead and no muscle.

With a beating heart I shambled along by my mother's side to Mr. Smith's
shop, in a street off Piccadilly, and here Mr. Smith handed me over to
Mr. Jones, the foreman, with instructions to "take the young man
upstairs to the workroom."

I stumbled after Mr. Jones up a dark, narrow, iron staircase till we
emerged through a trap-door into a garret at the top of the house. I
recoiled with disgust at the scene before me; and here I was to
work--perhaps through life! A low room, stifling me with the combined
odours of human breath and perspiration, stale beer, the sweet sickly
smell of gin, and the sour and hardly less disgusting one of new cloth.
On the floor, thick with dust and dirt, scraps of stuff and ends of
thread, sat some dozen haggard, untidy, shoeless men, with a mingled
look of care and recklessness that made me shudder. The windows were
tight-closed to keep out the cold winter air, and the condensed breath
ran in streams down the panes.

The foreman turned to one of the men, and said, "Here, Crossthwaite,
take this younker and make a tailor of him. Keep him next you, and prick
him with your needle if he shirks."

Mechanically, as if in a dream, I sat down, and as the foreman vanished
a burst of chatter rose. A tall, sharp-nosed young man bawled in my ear,
"I say, young 'un, do you know why we're nearer heaven here than our
neighbours?"

"Why?" I asked.

"Acause we're the top of the house in the first place, and next place
yer'll