shoemaker." She was correct in
her surmise, and right glad we were to make the old man's acquaintance;
not that he was very old, but then fifty-nine in a London slum may
be considered old age. He sat in a Windsor arm-chair in a very small
kitchen; a window at his back revealed that abomination of desolation, a
Bethnal Green backyard. He sat as he had sat for years, bent and doubled
up, for some kind of paralysis had overtaken him.

He had a fine head and a pointed beard, his thin and weak neck seemed
hardly able to bear its heavy burden. He was not overclean, and his
clothes were, to say the least, shabby. But there he sat, his wife at
work to maintain him. We stood, for there was no sitting room for us.
Grime, misery and poverty were in evidence.

He told us that his forefathers were Huguenots, who fled from France
and settled as silk weavers in Spitalfields. He had been apprenticed to
boot- and shoe-making, his particular branch of work having been boots
and shoes for actresses and operatic singers. That formerly he had
earned good money, but the trade declined as he had grown older, and now
for some years he had been crippled and unable to work, and dependent
upon his wife, who was a machinist.

There did not seem much room for imagination and poetry in his home and
life, but the following conversation took place--

"It is a very hard life for you sitting month after month on that chair,
unable to do anything!" "It is hard, I do not know what I should do if
I could not think." "Oh, you think, do you well, thinking is hard
work." "Not to me, it is my pleasure and occupation." "What do you think
about?" "All sorts of things, what I have read mostly." "What have you
read" "Everything that I could get hold of, novelists, poetry, history
and travel." "What novelist do you like best" The answer came prompt
and decisive: "Dickens," "Why?" "He loved the poor, he shows a greater
belief in humanity than Thackeray." "How do you prove that?" "Well, take
Thackeray's VANITY FAIR, it is clever and satirical, but there is only
one good character, and he was a fool; but in Dickens you come across
character after character that you can't help loving."

"Which of his books do you like best?" "A TALE OF TWO CITIES." "Why?"
"Well, because the French Revolution always appeals to me, and secondly
because I think the best bit of writing in all his books is the
description of Sydney Carton's ride on the tumbrel to the guillotine."
"Hav