ng
above all in these terrible days when the "unemployed" are huddling
under arches and in dark places where they lay their homeless heads, and
where, in the hours between night and morning, the cocoa-rooms open for
the hungry drivers of the big vans, who pour down great mugs of coffee
and cocoa, and make away with mountains of bread and butter. A penny
gives a small mug of cocoa and a slice of bread and butter, and the
owner of a penny is rich. Often it is shared, and the sharer, half drunk
still, it may be, and foul with the mud and refuse into which he
crawled, can hardly be known as human, save for this one gleam of
something beyond the human. Gaunt forms barely covered with rags,
hollow eyes fierce with hunger, meet one at every turn in this early
morning; and for many there is not even the penny, and they wait,
sometimes with appeal, but as often silently, the chance gift of the
buyer. Food for all the world, it would seem, and yet London is not fed;
and having once looked upon these waifs that are floated against the
pillars of the old market, one fancies almost a curse on the piles of
food that is not for them save as charity gives it, and the flowers that
even on graves will never be theirs.

Men and women huddle here, and under the arches, children skulk away
like young rats, feeding on offal, lying close in dark corners for
warmth, and hunted about also like rats. It is a poverty desperate and
horrible beyond that that any other civilized city can show; and who
shall say who is responsible, or what the end will be?

So the question lingers with one, as the market is left, and one passes
on and out to the Strand and its motley stream of life, lingering
through Fleet Street and the winding ways into the City, past St.
Paul's, and still on till London Bridge is reached and the Borough is
near. Fare as one may, north or south, west or east, there is no escape
from the sullen roar of the great city, a roar like the beat of a stormy
sea against cliffs. An hour and more ago, that perplexed and baffled
luminary the sun has struggled up through strange shapes and hues of
morning cloud, and for a few minutes asserted his right to rule. But the
gleam of gold and crimson brought with him has given way to the grays
and black which make up chiefly what the Londoners call sky, and over
London Bridge one passes on into the dim grayness merging into something
darker and more cheerless. On the Borough Road there should be som