Part 4
Danny was impressed. He said he wanted to be saved. He said he wouldn't mind giving religion a chance. But, what about work? He would have to work; that wasn't nice to begin with; and, where was he to find it?
Puncher said, 'Leave that to God.'
The answer was a fine one; it manifested a profundity of spiritual experience. For the Puncher knew that while ii his present state Danny was incapable of prolonged and monotonous work, and was inclined to give himself to religion only to escape prison and get a 'soft job'; nevertheless, let him be converted and his whole attitude to work and to religion would suffer a revolutionary change. Let him be converted, and he would welcome any work, the most arduous and dreary, so long as it was honest; let him be converted, and he would rather starve than live by the religion which had given him such pure joy.
Such was the Puncher's faith in conversion; such to him was the reality of the new birth.
And this is really what happened to Danny.
Danny came to the Salvation Army meeting; he felt a light of illumination break through his soul at the adjutant's assurance of God's love for the worst of men; he realized all of a sudden the need for love in his own barren heart, and in that spirit the spirit of a broken and contrite heart he knelt at the penitent form, and for the first time really reached into the infinite. He prayed for mercy; he prayed for strength.
He rose from his knees a changed man.
This change was absolute and entire. From being cruel, he became as tender as a woman. From being a cunning thief, he became scrupulously honest. From being a loafer and unemployable, who had never done a single day's work in his civil life, he became an industrious workman. From being basely selfish, he became considerate for others, giving both himself and presently his money to the service of religion. 'The greatest change in Danny,' said a friend who knows him well, 'is his gentleness. He couldn't hurt a fly now, and any tale of cruelty or suffering, especially where children are concerned, fairly breaks him down.' What a revolution in personality! What a new birth!
Danny has risen to be foreman in his employment, trusted and respected by his masters, and obeyed by those under him with the scrupulousness which inferior natures observe in their relations with a powerful will. He has married a religious woman, who would only accept his proposal on condition of his remaining always a soldier in the Salvation Army, and they both work for the Army, heart and soul, in their spare time. The home is one of the happiest in the district; Danny's bargaining in the matter of old furniture astonishing the whole neighbourhood. Such muslin curtains in the windows, such flower boxes on the sills, such carpets, pictures, easy chairs, and mantelpiece ornaments, are not to be matched for miles around. 'Oh, yes,' said one of his friends; 'he's a daddy for home.'
In spite of his appearance, which repels me, in spite of his manner, which repulses me, this once low brute has reached from vileness to goodness, and is a force on the side of religion. He loves his children very tenderly, he would no more whine or cadge than maltreat a drunken man, and he is never too tired to do a service, never unwilling to help in any good and noble work. Conversion has not altered his appearance or his manner; but it has given him a new soul.
Let this incident show to what point in spirituality such a base nature may be brought by religion. Not long ago one of his sisters, a flaming Roman Catholic, who seems to loathe her brother more now for his Salvationism than ever she did for his crimes, came to the open-air Sunday meeting of this corps, openly reviled and mocked her brother before the whole street, and finally struck him a stinging blow across the mouth.
All that Danny did was to cross to the other side of the ring. His look was very ugly; he was as white as a sheet, his eyes hardened and expressed that which almost frightened some people; but he restrained himself, held his peace, and kept his hands off the virago.
When you think what this man had been, you realize the merit of his conduct, and the miracle of his new character.
LOWEST OF THE LOW
MRS. BURRUP had her troubles from the earliest days of her marriage. But when her husband died, leaving her with a baby, their troubles began to be desperate, the common condition of the troubles of very poor, people. She could earn sufficient money by charing and laundrywork to keep the wolf on the mat, but the vista of her life promised no departure of this menace.
On occasional visits to the tavern she took her baby in her arms, so that he began to see something of life at an age when other children of other classes are restricted to a mere view of the sky from their backs on the cushions of perambulators. He was still little more than an infant, but, no doubt, subconsciously a very knowing one, when Mrs. Burrup took a second husband. The man was of a cheerful disposition and liked a glass. The happy couple drank together, and the knowing infant looked on. Who shall declare the thoughts of this child of poor London, or measure the effects upon his consciousness of this convivial infancy?
Something definite may be said of this emerging consciousness. When he was old enough to understand things, he perceived that the prevailing character of human life was trouble. The relations between his mother and stepfather were strained. From morning to night the voices of these two grown-ups, so inseparably connected with his life, were in a loud key. Occasionally their arms whirled and one of them would fall to the floor, rising with a reddened eye to shout fiercesounding words after the departing figure of the other. The child had some knowledge of what whirling arms signified. Occasionally he came in for a cuff, a shaking, or a peremptory smacking.
Later the boy discovered that he was generally hungry. This discovery swallowed up interest in all other phenomena. A hungry child inhabits a world of which we know nothing. He was quite young when he learned to look after the cravings of his own stomach. He did not steal, as so many boys in poor London do steal, merely for the sake of adventure and the love of danger, but rather in the rude, barbaric, and
honest fashion of our ancestors, to satisfy the demands of his body. He stole persistently. He stole because he wanted something to eat. Hundreds of children all over Europe are stealing to-day at the same inexorable instigation of nature; it does not do to think about it. One may seek to escape from the depression of such a thought, by considering the excitement of such a life to a child untroubled at present by scruples of conscience. The little boy, creeping up to shop doors or diving in and out of costermongers' barrows, with a sharp eye for policemen, could have told the sporting world something original and two-sided about hunting. He was fox and hound. He experienced the dangers, delights, and difficulties of running with the hare and hunting with the hounds. He hunted and was hunted. It is not to be expected that a little ignorant boy could prey upon respectable and law-abiding tradesmen with impunity, could outwit the watchfulness and sagacity of that immense force which society has raised for its protection against thieves, villains, pariahs, and outcasts. Again and again the poor little creature was laid by the heels, that is to say, had the lobe of an ear caught between the thumb and index of a policeman, and found himself marched thus ignominiously home to the rebuke of parental authority.
If he managed to elude the police, seldom a day went by when some watchful young tradesman at his shop door did not 'fetch him a crack on the head,' just as a warning not to steal from that particular shop.
The boy's life consisted of more kicks than ha'pence. If he was not one of those shivering, dirty, and neglected little creatures who creep about the streets on naked feet, with the rain wetting their mat of hair and the wind driving at their ragged jackets forlorn, famished, and wretched, at least he presented a picture to the religious conscience of England sufficiently disturbing. If someone had caught him early in those cruel days, had taken him from that wicked environment, taught him habits of cleanliness and self-respect, given him some idea of good and honour, placed him in a position where he could see life as a pleasant thing and reasonably understand the metaphor which calls Providence a Father, he might have grown into a manhood worthy of civilization and religion, he might have been saved from infamy. But no
one did this. None of the numerous charitable agencies to which humanity subscribes what it can afford out of its plenty rescued this stray little child exposed to the cruelties and temptations of the London streets. Beaten by a drunken stepfather, kicked and cuffed by tradesmen, hunted and arrested by the police this mite in the midst of vast London was utterly without friend or helper, except for his mother. Is it not terrible to think that we can devise nothing to save such suffering as this?
He was caught at a bad piece of stealing when he was just beginning his teens, and was taken to the police station like a criminal, locked up in a cell, and tried on the following morning by a magistrate in the police court. His sentence was three months in a reformatory school.
Either the methods of that school were not good, or the boy's bad habits had struck too deep a root in his character. He did not, at any rate, encounter such affection or deep interest in his career as to turn his heart. He left the school with some faint notion of discipline and order, but his heart was not touched.
Sick of himself and his own freedom, he left his parents at the age of sixteen, and after wandering about the world till there was nothing better to do, he enlisted as a soldier. He welcomed the Army as a sure and fairly decent 'doss.' He had clothes, a bed, almost enough food for his needs, and sufficient money at the end of a week to buy drink. He put up with the drills and discipline for these advantages. As for fighting, patriotism, honour of the regiment, and martial glory of a soldier's career, he thought no more about those things than any anarchist in Soho.
But as the monotony of a soldier's life more and more soured on his stomach, he imitated more and more successfully the example set to him in infancy by his stepfather. He became a hard drinker. The little boy who had suffered in the London streets was now a tall and bony man, six feet in height, small of head, with a fierce and quarrelsome face always aflame with alcohol. Continually he found himself in trouble over drunkenness; but he bore his punishment without shame
or regret, not having the smallest ambition to rise in the service. However, as drink laid an ever stronger hold upon him, he more and more relaxed his hold upon himself, more and more resented discipline, correction, and punishment. He became choleric, mutinous, and fierce. His temper was every day more out of control. When he was not in trouble with his officers he was in trouble with his messmates. He had the world against him, knew it, and opposed the world to the extent of his poor disdain and the fierceness of his anger.
At the end of five years' troubled soldiering he had a dispute with a corporal. Voices rose, words became violent. In the heat of this argument the corporal fell back upon authority. He gave his antagonist an order. The soldier refused to obey it; he was drunk, and the command of a smaller man goaded his rage to madness. The corporal threatened. At this the drunken soldier seized his rifle, and swearing that he would murder the other, made so good an attempt that he was arrested, tried, sentenced to six months' hard labour, and given 'his ticket' that is to say, discharged with ignominy.
When he came out from prison and found himself at large in the civilian world, he was wise enough to look about for employment before making a return to settled drinking. He got a decent job in some waterworks with fair wages, but took to drinking immediately he felt himself certain of wages at the end of the week. He hated his work. He appears to have been constitutionally incapable of finding pleasure or interest in any employment. He honestly disliked all physical exertion. It irked him, irritated him, bored him. But nothing really pleased him, except drink. Life did not interest him in the least. He drank to drown his sorrow, to forget life. What a world! where it is necessary for a man to go to work six days out of seven!
This man was weighed down by an immense ennui.
Drink lost him this good employment, and he went from the waterworks to a distillery a change for the worse, from water to whisky. It was not long before drunkenness lost him this second job,
and in a tipsy rage at being dismissed he had a row with the police, and was sent to prison for three months.
When he came out from prison he descended to the depths of infamy.
It is impossible in this book to tell the story of his life at this point in his career. It can only be hinted. Coming out of prison in rebellion against the world, determined that never again would he do a day's work, Burrup went to a public-house, where he fell in with a woman earning her own living by evil ways. He does not appear to have realized at once, or to have contemplated for some time, the nature of the proposal made to him by this woman. He was attractive, and he thought she admired him. He knew that she was aware of his homeless condition, and thought that her invitation to lodge with her was just a woman's kindness born of admiration He accepted it, and for some days lodged in that fashion. Then he found himself provided with money by this woman. A little later and he was called in to assist her in her business. Of a sudden he found himself the lowest of men.
Did his conscience ever smite him? Yes. To this extent: When the woman's earnings were not sufficient for their needs he went out and thieved for her. That was all. Apparently he soon got over the contempt which even low people in low neighbourhoods openly show for such men. He avoided the half-decent population, and consorted with men engaged in the same horrible parasitism. All this time he was drinking hard. Alcohol, a doctor would have said, was destroying the very fibres of reformation.
Presently he seems to have contracted a spirit of bravado. He became definitely and resolutely a criminal. He found crime a sport. He went out into the streets, not as a hungry boy, but as a thirsty man, and set himself to make money without work, for very joy of the undertaking. He was drinking hard, and his brain seemed to be on fire with criminal ideas. He supported his mistress in this fashion for some time; but was soon a marked man, and therefore from that moment was in trouble with the police. He was arrested time and again, and always he made such a fight of these arrests that it took as a rule six constables
to strap him down on the ambulance and get him to the station. Once, when they caught him stealing boots, he so 'bashed' the police about that the mounted patrol had to be called, and he was tied to the horse and dragged all the way to the station. He was generally halfmurdered during these arrests, being known as one of the worst 'copper-bashers' in London. On such a man as he was then only God could have mercy.
Twelve years after his discharge from the Army, Burrup looked back on three years of immoral freedom and nine years of prison. Nine years out of the twelve spent in prison! A bad retrospect. What could the future hold? He began to think. His character and the manner of his life had long been so notorious that everybody in the whole of that neighbourhood knew about him, knew about the woman. Among those who knew, and who thought about him, were the angel-adjutant and the Puncher. They tried to reach his soul, tried to lift him from infamy, but he shook them both off with an angry impatience.
A time came, however, when misery made him willing to hear them. His mistress was in gaol; he was hungry, thirsty, and ashamed; he was thinking of the nine years out of twelve spent in prison; he was beginning to feel that the future held no hope for him; that his tomorrow meant the prison; that for ever he would be harried and maltreated by the police; he was at last so broken and wretched and defeated as to desire some escape.
He thought about the Puncher. He compared that man's past and present. He saw how marvellous was the change in that life, and brooded upon it. While he was thinking, some force in his brain began quietly urging him to follow the Puncher, to do as he had done, to get religion.
He was aware that no one in the whole world could do anything but despise him. He knew that he was vile, degraded, infamous, friendless. He knew that the police were against him, that magistrates were ready to send him to prison with bitter words of contempt, that his physical strength was powerless against the forces of law and order, that his
hatred of society was a vain fire in his brain, that he had muddled life and had the whole universe against him. If he told the world that he wanted to live a better life, the world would spurn him. Not a soul would believe him. He had asked his prison visitor, a Roman Catholic priest, during his last term if someone could not help him to go straight; and he had received not only no help, but no encouragement to desire a better life. He felt that there was only one hope for him, the Army that had made the Puncher a decent, good man with a comfortable home.
That was the illumination of this sunken and degraded soul. 'I had watched the Puncher's life, I had seen it running clean and straight; and I resolved all of a sudden that if God could do such a miracle as that, I could have "a cut at it too." The diction is of the smallest moment. This man's desire to have ' a cut at it,' translated into the most wistful phrasing of an exquisite mysticism, would still beggar the words. The desire was the miracle It was a movement of the soul in the spiritual sphere. When he felt a longing to try religion, his soul said, 'I will arise and go to my Father,' and he had come to himself. His mind, blundering with words and concerned with material things, must not obscure for us the hidden movements of his spirit waking from death, turning to the light, and desiring rest. This man, with all his abomination thick about him, was subliminally moving towards God. Whatever the spring of his desire, whatever the cause of his awakening, he desired to be better, that is to say, he turned his face to the light.
He went straight to the hall of the Salvation Army, sat by himself at the back of the room, listened to the hymns, prayers, and readings, heard the preaching and the invitation, rose from his seat, marched to the platform, knelt down at the penitent form, and said in a low voice, ' God be merciful to me a sinner.'
The past dropped from him like a ragged garment. He was conscious of a great cleansing. A yearning of his soul carried him far away from the hall, the Salvationists, and the congregation of prayerful people. He was caught up into a glowing region of light and intensest
satisfaction. Dumb and breathless, he knelt with his face in his hands, conscious only of the radiance, the peace, and the joy. He did not think, 'I am forgiven,' or 'I am saved'; he only knew vividly and yet in a state of dream that he was at last perfectly happy.
He came out of this ecstasy to the mothering tenderness of the adjutant and the paternal kindness of the Puncher. What a revelation to a soul plunged in wretchedness!
He was surrounded and supported by pure affection. If the delirious joy of his ecstasy had passed and faded like a dream, at least he was not left alone; he was with good people, who, knowing his old vileness, showed him love, who, knowing the desperate record of his past, showed him trust.
He felt a strength come to his limbs and a power to his mind. He would be worthy of these friends. He said, 'I know what has happened to me.' They asked him what? He said, 'I have been given a second chance.'
In a conversation with the adjutant, it was decided that he should marry his mistress when she came out of prison, and make it a part of his life's work to save her soul. The Salvation Army does not make repentance an easy and a pleasant thing; they certainly do not let a man buy an indulgence for his past. If a man or woman comes for salvation, and being saved, confesses to some undiscovered crime, the Army insists upon confession to the wronged person and to absolute reparation. This is not done here and there, occasionally, it is a fixed rule, obligatory upon all penitents throughout the world. Many who come to the penitent form go straight to prison to prove repentance real, suffering for felonies undiscovered and now impossible of discovery.
Burrup began his new life by hawking flowers. He got sufficient money to buy two pots of flowers, and walked about the streets till he had sold them. The purchaser of the last pot, taking compassion on the man, talked to him, and gave him temporary employment. A lady
of title interested in the Army gave him an engagement for six weeks. In both cases he received the very highest reference for honesty, sobriety, and painstaking industry.
But before the second employment came he had had his last meeting with the woman. He and the adjutant went to the prison to receive this poor creature on the threshold of her freedom. She started at sight of the Salvationist, and stared first at the adjutant, and then at Burrup, silent and perplexed. The adjutant told her that Burrup had determined to live a clean and respectable life, that he wished to begin that new life by an act of duty by marrying the woman who had been his mistress, and that before they could become man and wife it would be well if she would place herself in one of the Salvation Army's homes. The woman fired up at this suggestion. She not only resented the idea of entering a home, but mocked Burrup for wishing to marry her. The adjutant pleaded, the woman grew more violent and contemptuous. It was not until she saw how hopeless was her mission that the adjutant gently reproached the woman for her evil. At this, curses and blasphemies took the place of contempt. The adjutant and her convert moved away. The woman followed them. Through the crowded streets the convert had to march at the Salvationist's side with this virago following at his heels, shouting out to all the world what he had been, cursing him, spitting on him. The man endured it, very white of face, and grim, without a word. It would have been easier for some people perhaps to face a den of lions. 'I hailed a bus,' the adjutant tells me, 'compelling her to stay behind, and we left her, feeling that we could not do anything with her, as she was not willing to leave her life of sin.' That is the test, without which help is of no avail. Until a soul hates evil, little can be done; until it desires good, nothing. For some little time the woman martyred the poor man struggling to lead a clean and virtuous life. She haunted his lodgings and insulted him in public. She did all she could to drag him down, to break his heart, to drive him mad. But he stuck to his work, suffered her annoyance, and never once looked back.
He set himself another task. This woman refused to let him save her. There was another woman to whom he felt himself responsible. His mother.
Look quietly and steadily at the effects of conversion, the fruits of repentance, in this man's soul. I think they are worth considering. Remember what he had been, the lowest of the low, consider the privation, destitution, and crime of his earliest childhood; see him as he was all through his life, a thief, pander, bully, and abandoned drunkard; and then mark him, after momentary conversion, continuing his hard work, quietly maintaining his honesty and sobriety under the mocking persecution of his former partner in crime, and, above all things, setting himself to discover the whereabouts of his mother.
The more one thinks about Burrup, the more one apprehends the tremendous power of religion. Conversion did not make him merely a sober and industrious man. That alone would have been a miracle, for he loved drink as he hated work. But conversion did more for him. It washed away from his soul at a single stroke all the obstructions of ingrained habits, cleansed him from every impulse of his moral madness, and made him at once tender, loving, considerate, and pure. He was not content with saving his own soul; conversion would not let him rest in personal security or in flattering self-righteousness, he was driven by the Spirit, gladly and rejoicingly, to make others aware of spiritual peace.
And, as we say, he had one overmastering impulse to seek out his mother and be a son to her. Hypnotism, possibly, might have cured him of drink; but what power could have made him this seeker of his lost mother?
He found her in great wretchedness. The step-father had abandoned her, and she was exposed to all the privations and cruelties which beset a solitary poor woman at the threshold of old age. The son told her of his life, told her of his conversion, and asked if she would not come and shape his home and his happiness.
This is a new version of the Prodigal Son. Nobler story of its kind, noble in all its simplicity and humility, can hardly be conceived. This prodigal did not return to the shelter and love of a rich and righteous parent, ready with rewards; but, when he had come to himself, he set out to save that which was lost, set out to offer his shelter and his love to a mother whose care was parted from his memory by years of wildness and crime; and truly may it be said that when he was yet a great way off he saw her, and ran and fell upon her neck and kissed her so eager and passionate was the desire of his soul.
Happiness came to him in the response made by the broken mother to his offers of affection. She was like one raised from the dead, and clung to her strong son with beseeching and heart-breaking pleadings not to be left again, not to be left in misery and despair. Her cry to him was like a cry to God. The son saved by God, in God's strength saved his mother. In their first embrace, they realized to the full the need for religion, and both experienced at least some of the satisfactions of spiritual peace. Only religion could have saved her son, only religion could have sent the son to save the mother. They had both lived without religion, and they had both suffered. Now, in the awakening of spiritual consciousness, they perceived that only religion made life pure, sweet, and sacred.
She could hardly believe that it was indeed her son who came to lift her up. She could hardly believe that the terrible nightmare of her dark life had really come to an end. And she was like a character in the Arabian Nights when he led her away from her destitution and showed her the home that his love had prepared for her. Religion has these earthly enchantments.
Burrup's home is one of the brightest and happiest in London. It is full of the decorations and showiness with which a London workman loves to manifest both his prosperity and his domesticity, and all these fine things are kept in a state of glory by the saved mother who now has no thought but of showing her gratitude to her son with duster and broom and serving him all the days of her life. She is converted to his religion, and son and mother are as loyally and devotedly attached
to each other as any pair of human beings in the world. He loves to put by his savings to give his mother little treats and little surprises oh, quite little treats and surprises, for they are poor people; and she, on her part, loves to make him some tempting dish for his supper, and, by her labour, to keep his linen and his wardrobe in apple-pie order, to show her gratitude for his love and her pride in her son. They are quite beautiful in their love, and if Burrup Is proud of anything in his life, it is that he can support his mother.
One thinks that this man is not completely happy; that the memory of the past still haunts his peace; and that he will never wholly escape, as he did in the radiance of his conversion, from the black shadow of his dead iniquity.
There are those in the world, to this very day, who like to remind him of what he was. You have no idea, perhaps, how difficult it is for a man to live out his repentance in poor London.
He said to one of his friends the other day, after talking over the dark days behind him suddenly drawing himself up to his full height and assuming the look of dignity which becomes his proud, silent, and soldier-like face: 'Several would like to see me go back; ah, several! But there is nothing to go back for. I know, as God knows, that I am far from perfect. But I am better than I used to be.'
Do not mistake this clear assertion for self-righteousness. Burrup said, and says to this day, that his conversion was a second chance. He does not talk about the love of God. ,He thinks that he has yet a long way to go, and he 5s watching himself. God has given him a second chance. He stands firm on that conviction, and marks carefully his conduct under the mercy of this chance. Quite truthfully and honestly he says, 'I am far from perfect.' With a profound gratitude, a London workman's sursum corda, he says, 'I am better than I used to be.'
THE PLUMBER
HE made a bad start of life. At the age of six he was running every morning to a public-house for his mother's 'livener.' To get even with this mother for routing him out of bed before the day was aired, he used to drink some of the beer, occasionally some of the gin. The curiosity of a child's mind may be seen in this, that he arranged these revengeful sips for moments when he would be observed by other children. It was a piece of swagger, as well as the savage action of revenge. Such can be the mind of a child of six.
A recent Act of Parliament has put an end to what was once a common incident of the London streets in early mornings little half-dressed, bare-legged children creeping along close to the houses with a pot of beer in their hands. Many people have wondered to what ends such children would grow. This is the story of a man who began life in that fashion.
His father was a hard and brutal-minded man, but not a drunkard. His mother, on the other hand, was 'addicted to drink.' Her addiction began at the moment when she woke from her sleep, it lasted through the day, and was at its fullest power at the hour when publicans close their doors and count their takings. She was one of those women typical of street corners, court entries, and the bench of the public bar. A hat was seldom on her head, her hair hung in a loose knot over her neck, her face which was fat, pink, soft, and shining cleaned itself when it felt hot with the dirty end of an apron. She was a big woman, huge-armed, immense in the bosom, broad in the hips, roundshouldered, and firm-necked. There was a sullen savagery in her small eyes, a bitter ferocity in her lips; her voice was harsh, fierce, and vigorous. A typical mother of the London slums thirty years ago, and a type still to be seen among the little white-faced rats and ferrets of the present generation. She did no work. The children were given halfpence to get their meals at barrows, coffee stalls, and fried-fish shops. This habit of taking one's meals in restaurants has since spread to the fortunate classes, one of many fashions which the upper class has borrowed from the lowest; in the case of this woman the habit
grew from a branch of the servant problem, her own constitutional and impatient disgust for domestic work; it is a spirit common in the slums contempt for work. The father, a navvy, tried to cure his wife of her addiction. He tried with both hands. The impression he made upon her was visible to the naked eye, but the addiction still flourished in the grey matter beyond the reach of fists, hob-nails, and straps. Disappointed in the failure of his persuasive powers, and occasionally vexed to find no food in the house, the navvy eased his ruffled feelings by 'strapping the kids.' He was a man with a troubled brow, a sad eye, and a voice that growled curses on God and human life with a dull monotony. It was not a happy home, and not in the least original. It was one of thousands and thousands of precisely similar homes in London. Cupid, when he descends to the London gutter, appears to delight in the wanton mischief of making these unequal marriages the sober man yoked to the drunken woman, the drunken man yoked to the sober wife, with always the drunken party in the ascendant. The parents of the man in this story were very like the parents of tens of thousands of children now playing in the streets of London, or carrying their penny for dinner to the gaudy barrow of the Italian vendor of ice-cream.
And I do not think the child was abnormal in the earliness of his cunning. It is common to find quite small infants in shabby districts adept at tricks which in their elders are crimes. This child was naturally quick-witted, intelligent, bright, and humorous. To this day he has the roguish, pleasant face of a comic singer. It struck him as a relief from strappings and other home discomforts to practise sharpness in the world outside. He was one of a great swarm of little hungry, dirty-faced boys wandering through the streets of London looking for what they could pick up. He was a really smart boy when he went out to work, so smart, indeed, as to begin at once making money on his own account. He served a milkman. A very simple facility in sleight-of-hand earned him threepence or fourpence a day. By spilling his dipper as he took the measure from the can, and giving an extra drop afterwards which appeared even more than he spilled, but which was carefully less, he always had milk for sale at the bottom of his can on which his master had no call. In this way he flourished,
earned the reputation of being a singularly smart and cheerful boy, and was soon able to get a place in the shop. It was so easy to steal in this place that he was found out. He was sent to prison.
A check of this kind makes some impression on a sensitive boy, however immoral his upbringing. He came out of prison with the idea of never going back there again if he could help it. Reformation having appeared, he was assisted to learn a trade. He was apprenticed to a firm of plumbers and gasfitters.
'Of all the trades in this world,' he says, with emphasis, 'the plumber's is the thickest'; that is to say, the worst from a moral point of view. I don't know what it's like now, I hope it's better; if it is, it's a marvel. But my experience is this there isn't a bigger set of thieves than plumbers. How it comes about, I don't know; carpenters are different, every trade is different, but plumbers seem as if they can't help being what they are, which is hot, and no mistake. I'd as soon have a burglar on my premises any day as a London plumber. That's a strong thing to say, isn't it? That's a rum thing to say of a whole trade? Ah, but it's true.'
His first experience of this trade with a bad name was the hardening process. The boy apprentice comes in at once for that brutalizing tyranny which throughout the poorest quarters of London, even among respectable people, seems to regard all politeness, cleanliness, and affection as signs of an evil effeminacy. If you go into any of the London parks, the Regent's, for instance, and stand where poor children are playing in a swarm, you will never hear a sweet or gentle voice. Sisters shout across distance at each other as though they were challenging to a fight: 'Come here, can't you?' 'Emmy, d'you hear what I say! come here at once!' 'Shut your noise!' 'You're a liar!' Cries and calls such as these, and all uttered in voices of ferocity, are the common language of London childhood. And it is only a part of a very wide and potent force in the national character the hard sternness which makes the poor endure their miseries in silence, the unyielding fortitude which supports them in an abject poverty and a vile destitution which they believe natural, inevitable, life in the real. I
have heard scores and scores of working people speak about the upper classes as people who are unreal, a nursery of children playing with dolls houses. The real life is the hard life of poverty.
'They were very warm to me,' says the Plumber. 'I tell you it was no fun to have a two-foot steel rule walking round your ribs. Anything not done just as they wanted it to be done, anything blundered over in the very slightest swish! down came the rule, and it was hell for days afterwards. I've seen men in these shops take up a pot of hot metal solder and sling it at the head of a boy that had done something a bit cock-eye, or given a back answer. We had to look pretty slippy, I can tell you.'
Such was the hard and brutalizing start at his trade experienced by the Plumber. But he was quick in the uptake, his eyes were sharp with the cunning of their childhood, he learned quickly, did well, and had that in his nature which made him less objectionable in the eyes of his master than some others he was cheerful, amusing, wicked. There was no occasion in his case to teach the drink habit. Some apprentices have to be forced to the pot. He loved it. He loved it, perhaps, as much for its swaggering manhood as anything else, but still he loved it for itself. He got a feeling of comfort from it, and a touch of daring which exhilarated his spirits. He was quite a hard drinker all through the days of his apprenticeship. He was often manfully drunk, early in his teens, to the great delight of the plumbers.
'Up to sixteen years of age,' he said, 'I would pinch anything, and it all went in booze. After sixteen I pinched as a plumber, with discretion, and that, too, all went in booze. 'About his boyhood's pinchings we need not inquire; sufficient is it that the training of his childhood ruled his mind with the idea that to steal was to be clever. He was, practically, entirely without the moral sense. His idea was to get money anyhow, and to spend it in drink. But after sixteen years of age his apprenticeship left behind him, and his wages secured he stole with discretion, he stole as a plumber.
There is one particular material used by plumbers which has a ready sale; it is sheet lead, or, in their parlance, 'pigeon,' occasionally 'bluey.' It is a part of a plumber's day or shall we say it was a part of the old plumber's day? to steal sufficient sheet lead to pay for the night's beer, and a bit over. No man was called a plumber who could not 'carry the pin,' or 'carry the pony'; that is to say, who could not carry a good part of a hundredweight of sheet lead inside his trousers, suspended from a belt round his middle. This was no easy task. To steal the ' bluey ' was not always easy, to store it quickly away was sometimes a job, but to carry it undetected, to walk and work without crying out when the sheet slipped this was heroic work. The Plumber at sixteen years of age proved himself a hero at this work.
To give you some idea of the extent to which this thieving is practised, let me narrate a single instance. A branch office of a well-known bank was erected near Hyde Park, and my Plumber was one of the many expert thieves employed on the job. Detectives were engaged to stand in the street, not only to watch the men at work, but to follow any of them who walked home in a manner that aroused suspicion. Now, in the contract there was an item of seven tons of sheet lead for the roof. In spite of foremen, detectives, and extra precautions in every way, only two and a half tons were used, and not a single man was caught.
Many a time my Plumber came down the long ladders with threequarters of a hundredweight of sheet lead under his trousers' belt, and walked to his public-house, pipe in mouth, bag over his shoulder, like an honest British working-man, ready to floor any detective who aspersed his honour.
This sheet lead was carried to what plumbers call 'sand shops.' It is a clever phrase. It signifies 'shiftiness,' and stands for those shops known to every plumber in the trade as places where stolen lead is bought at current market rates. Not a working plumber in London who does not know the market price of 'pigeon'; it forms a topic of conversation in public-houses throughout the town. The list of 'sand shops' in London would surprise the polite world.
At the first job to which the Plumber went he had an experience which gave him a 'bit of a turn.' It was a building ninety feet high, near the Strand. When he had climbed the ladder and reached the roof, the men employed on the job suggested that he should cry 'beer-o' (pay his footing by standing a pot of beer.) My man said 'No' with a Cockney's indignation at being suspected of any greenness. 'You won't, won't you?' 'No,' he shouted, 'I'll see you in hell first!'
In an instant they were round him. He was pinioned, a rope was passed under his arms, and he was dropped over the side of the roof. Down he went, in sickening jerks, for thirty or forty feet, and there he hung. ' Will you cry beer-o?' they shouted from the top. And at last he had to yield. On the next day that same rope snapped with a small load of sheet lead, which fell sixty feet to the pavement below.
At eighteen, in spite of frightful waste in drink, the Plumber had sufficient money and sufficient patrons for he is a most likeable and pleasant fellow to start in a little business of his own. He was now habitually drunk. He looks back to days when, not occasionally, but as a regular thing, he was working at the top of a ninety-rung ladder which was not tied to the roof, or crossing in hob-nailed boots iron girders stretched across nothingness eighty feet and more off the ground, quite drunk.
He never went to a job at which he did not look for something besides his work; and the proceeds of this pinching always went in drink. He tells me that the contents of a plumber's bag would astonish old gentlemen interested in museums. Let us hope that to-day it would be a monstrous thing to swell the statistics of the criminal classes with the rank and file of the plumbing trade.
'One day,' he says, 'I was sent for to a toff's house to look for an escape of gas. Me and my mate found the escape, and it took some finding, too, for it was behind a wainscot; but while we were looking for the escape, we found something else a box of Havana cigars. Into my bag they went, sharp; and at that minute in comes the toff himself.
"Well, have you found it?" "Yes, sir, we've found it, sir, and a nasty one, too, sir." "Here's a shilling for yourselves, you've done well." "Yes, sir, I think we have; thank you, sir," and we walked out, two splendid specimens of the honest British working man! But it was always like that. And never once a feeling of shame.'
Money easily earned, he quotes with emphatic conviction, is money easily spent, which means beer. He earned pounds every week, and sometimes on Saturday afternoon he was pawning his tools for the evening's finish-up.
'Ah,' he says, 'to give you an idea of the jolly friends a man gets in that way; not once, but many times, my pals have said to me, "Put your tools up the spout, old boy, we'll get you through, we'll get 'em out for you," and after having drunk the money away, when I came to ask them for help, "Get 'em out yourself," they'd answer; "you put 'em up, you get 'em down." Later on, when I was starving yes, starving! those men wouldn't give me a crust, not one of them.'
He got married before he was twenty, and he vowed soon afterwards that if his baby was a boy he'd get really drunk to celebrate the event. But he was impatient, and couldn't wait. He began three months before the child was born, and for seven years after he was always profoundly drunk. He lost job after job. In two houses they found him flat on his back in the cellar with the taps of the wine-casks spurting over his face. Ferocity began to manifest itself in his temper. He was strong, and handy with his fists. He fought many a fight with the naked fists. He picked up a foreman who corrected him one day, and threw him through a glass window. He was always in trouble. His private business vanished altogether. He had to go about looking for work. Then this man, bred from infancy to drink and to steal, uninstructed in the first letters of morality, educated only in sharpness, cunning, and clever dishonesty, but who had preserved all through this base and scurvy career the natural good-humour, and cheerfulness of his temperament, became one of those wretches who play the tyrant in
the house that they have ruined. The Plumber took to flogging his starved children one of them, a little girl, said to him in my presence, looking up into his face with a cunning smile, 'We've often felt the buckle-end of your belt, haven't we, daddy?' took to flogging, kicking, and striking these poor starved children, so that at the first sound of his footsteps on the stair they would run for cover under the bedstead. His wife withstood him. He fought her. He proved himself her master. He went out from the room where she lay, beaten and half stunned, a proud man. But his wife was not cowed. She nagged him. He never came home but she reproached him for his brutality, his drunkenness, his abhorrent cruelty. One day in a fit of ungovernable rage, he seized her, flung her down the flight of stairs, raced down after her, and aimed a blow at her head,, which split the top of the banister and scarred his wrist for life. He all but murdered her. And for drink, everything he could lay his hands on was sold. The furniture went from his home, his tools, the clothes of the children everything. He got to the lowest depth but one to which drink can bring a man. He reached that horrible stage where the wife stands with her children at the door of a public-house waiting for the husband to come out. He spent money on beer while the children of his body starved and shivered and cried at the door. He never experienced one pang of remorse. Never once did his conscience upbraid him. He got beer, by hook or by 'crook'; there for him the universe ended.
One day the news reached him that his oldest mate, and the closest companion of all his early depravity, had joined the local corps of the Salvation Army. It made no difference to the Plumber. Drunk at his work, he went straight to the public-house, delivered there on occasion, for the diversion of the company, mock sermons or sang comic songs, and only went out at closing-time, followed home through the rain and the darkness and the cold by his wife with a baby at her breast.
He was in one of his favourite public-houses when his wife opened the door one day, entered, and said to him, 'Come out, or give me money for the children's food.'
He took no notice. She waited, looking at him watched by the publican and the potman and then retired to the door. The Plumber's mates began to say, 'I wouldn't have the old woman follow me about.' He lifted his face from his beer, turned his head and shouted to the woman at the door to get out, like a dog. She said that she should wait there till he left. 'Will you?' he cried, with an oath, laying down his pot. And in a clumsy stride or two he had delivered a running kick with his hobnail boot at the mother of his children. She moved away, and escaped a fatal injury.
He followed her to the door. 'God!' he cried, 'if you don't leave me alone, I'll!' He had exhausted blasphemy and menace. He paused for a moment, and concluded, 'I'll sign the pledge.' 'Oh, you've often done that,.' she retorted, 'and wetted it every time!' Now what actual spring worked in his mind at these words it is difficult to say, difficult to conjecture. One can find nothing in the man's past to suggest a thesis. But the words of his wife produced an extraordinary effect in his mind. He did not return to the publichouse; he did not go home with her; he walked away like a man in a dream. He only knows that he was impelled to walk away. As he passed the big hall occupied by the Salvation Army, he says he suddenly felt himself grow stiff through all his joints, his feet appeared to strike root into the ground, he was unable to move. There he stood, this drunk man dazed, bewildered, quiet like a sleep-walker.
While he stood there the thought occurred to him of his old mate who had joined the Salvation Army. Whence came this idea, he does not know; but it came. A desire to see this man made itself felt in the Plumber's heart, and with the desire the tension of his limbs relaxed. He walked forward and made his way up the stairs to the hall door. The only officers present at that time were women. When they saw this terrible drunken man approaching, they were afraid, and chained the door against him. He looked like murder.
'Don't be afraid,' he said. 'I only want to know where so-and-so lives. ' They told him over the chain, and he walked away. He found his friend in his room.
'Charlie,' he said, 'I want to get out of what I am. Do you think I can do it?' 'Not alone,' said the other. 'Tell me, for Christ's sake!' 'Do you mean it? Are you in earnest?' 'If ever I was in my life.' 'Well, then, you've just got to tell God what you've told me. Do it now. Kneel down. Tell Him.'
And the Plumber knelt down and uttered his first prayer. He rose dazed, confused, shaken. He was trembling like a leaf.
The other said, 'You must come to the meeting tonight, and you must go to the penitent form, and say out loud that you're sorry, that you want the new life, and that you know you can do nothing yourself to get it. How do you feel now?' 'All of a twitter,' said the Plumber.
He went out into the streets alone. He was conscious of some great change in himself which seemed to affect the world outside of him. He was glad in himself, and the outside world seemed glad. The pavements shone with fire, the distance was a haze of bright light, the leaves of all the trees in the road, he says, seemed like hands waving to him. He felt that he had come out of nightmare into a dream. He was aware that Something had gone out of him, that he had no desire for any of the things which hitherto this vanished Something had driven him to seek; he was aware of a swimming and hovering brightness inhabiting the place in his thought from which this Something had been expelled. He was so happy that he could have shouted for joy. He was so frightened of losing this ethereal happiness that he dared not think about it. The drunken man walked in a shining light on pavements of fire, with the trees waving to him, with his soul dazed by ecstasy.
That night he went to the meeting, made his public confession, and rose up with a deepened conviction that he had got a new life.
On the following morning, for the first time in his lift untormented by a craving for alcohol or tobacco, he yet found himself with insufficient courage to face the service in the open air, dreading the mockery of the world. But he went to the evening meeting, and returned home past many a public-house without the smallest desire to enter.
He went to his work next day, guessing what welcome he would receive from his mates. He spoke to no one, and went straight to the unfinished room of a great building in which his work lay, and began his job. In a few minutes the door opened, and a group of his old friends entered, plumbers by trade and plumbers by soul.
'Morning, Alf.' 'Morning.' 'Ain't you dry?' 'No. ' 'Ain't you got a thick head?' 'No.' 'Wouldn't you like half a gauge now?" 'No.' 'What, not just half a gauge to oil the works?' 'No.' After a pause, ' See your old friend on Saturday, Alf?' 'Yes. ' 'Go to the Salvation Army?' 'Yes. ' 'Did you find Jesus?' 'Yes. ' They burst out laughing. 'What! And you a mock preacher, proving there isn't no God? Stow it, Alf! Look here, you take it quietly by yourself, when no one is looking' and they put a bottle of beer on the floor by his feet, and went out, closing the door.
At twelve o'clock they came back. The beer was not drunk. They examined the cork. They tasted the liquor; to see that water had not been put to it. Then they turned, and with filthy words, vile phrases,
and horrible blasphemies assaulted the poor soul that had been born again. Brutal as they were, one must not judge them too harshly. The change was made suddenly, and only a saint really believes in repentance for sin. The best of us are suspicious of the prodigal son; we never believe that the lost sheep prefers in its heart the fold to the mountain.
For two or three days the Plumber suffered bitterly at his work. He was mocked, taunted, teased, and insulted with studied and incessant cruelty. He bore it without reproach. Before the end of the week was reached a day came for the 'rhubarb,' that is to say, a subsidy, or an advance of their wages. This was paid in a public-house. The Plumber went with the rest. While he waited for the foreman he was offered beer and chaffed unmercifully about salvation. When he received his money, they told him, with a savage satisfaction, that a score was against him on the slate for fifteen shillings. He paid this money a small part of the price of his past sins and walked out of the publichouse.
He went home.
When he entered the room where his children had suffered so terribly, and where absolute starvation had only been kept at bay by the toil of his wife, he realized that this was his first home-coming as a penitent. The woman and the children knew that some change had taken place in him; the woman believed that in a drunken moment he had joined the Salvation Army. She expected that he would be drunk on the day of the 'rhubarb'; none believed in the miracle. They stood amazed, gaping at him, because he had come back straight from work. The children looked frightened, the woman dazed. He went to his wife, and said, 'You want a bit of money, I expect,' and gave her a sovereign. She stared at him, and then looked down at the gold coin in the palm of her hand. The children glanced nervously at each other, and held their breath. There was a silence in the desolate room for a moment, the man awkward, the woman dazed, the children confounded.
At last he said, 'The kids would like a bit of dinner, wouldn't they? Shall we go along and buy a piece of meat?' She continued to look from him to the coin, from the coin to him. 'I'm ready to go, if you are,' he said. She raised her eyes to his, and studied him. 'Alf,' she said, 'do you mean it?' 'Yes,' he said, and, getting rid of nervousness, he kissed her.
It was the first time he had kissed his wife, literally, for years. It was the first time since their first baby was born that he had come home not drunk and not tyrannous.
All the bitter suffering of the long past, all the cruel blows and torturing neglect, all the hunger and ache, the poverty, wretchedness, shame, and despair of her life crowded the woman's brain, and she broke down under the overpowering contrast of this new thing in her, life affection and kindness.
Was the hard past really at an end? Was the long monotony of cruelty, starvation, and despair to which she had now become habituated, truly broken?
For that day, at any rate, there was happiness in the home.
In the morning the Plumber returned to his work. He was not subjected to mockery, but he was given all the hardest and dirtiest jobs. He was so happy that he did not resent this treatment. He began to sing Salvationist hymns.
The foreman approached. 'Stow that music,' he said. 'Why?' 'The other men object to it, and I don't wonder, either.'
The Plumber worked in silence. Presently the other men in his vicinity began to sing. They sang all the vilest songs they could think of, songs that parody pure love, religion, and even elementary refinement, with the lowest and most abominable filthiness.
The Plumber was not a man to take persecution of this kind with meekness. He went to the foreman, and said, 'If I mayn't sing hymns, these chaps mustn't sing beastliness; you've stopped me, stop them.' He carried his point, and the others left him alone. The last tyranny of fellow-workmen now fell to his experience. He was put to Coventry. No one spoke to him. Among all those men, his former mates and companions, he worked in silence and in isolation, his presence, his existence ignored by everybody, both by men and boys.
A French friend of mine said to me the other day, 'I do not think the Salvation Army will ever be so great a success in France as in England; in France one is more sensitive to ridicule, more obedient to public opinion.' This remark made me think of the Plumber. Consider his stubborn courage, his masculine endurance under persecution. He was one against many, in an employment which necessitated the closest companionship; and the opposing majority were men with whom he had thieved, drunk, blasphemed, and jested for many years. It must not be supposed either that he was so carried away by religious exaltation as to make tyranny a small matter to him, or that his nature was too coarse and his sensitiveness too blunt for suffering. He was a London workman making a fight for his soul. The first uprush of spiritual freedom which had swept him out of all his old habits had now departed. He was left to fight his battles with normal powers. He was an ordinary man fighting for decency, respectability and holiness, in the midst of men who knew every letter in his iniquitous and depraved past. He felt their cruelty sharply. A companionable man, fond of comic songs and hilarious bar frolic he felt keenly this loneliness, isolation, and neglect.
For a day or two he endured the cruelty of Coventry. Then came the end of the week. He received the remainder of his wages in a publichouse, and was told that the job was postponed for a week or two, and that no one would be required on the following Monday.
He went home. It seemed to him a hard thing, just when he had made this fresh start and the desolate room was beginning to put on the appearance of a
home, that the means of daily bread should be taken from him. The workman who is told on Saturday that he will not be required on Monday loses the feeling that Sunday is a day of rest; he carries home with him a load heavier than sheet lead.
The Plumber did not say anything to his wife about this end of the job. He read a little cheap New Testament which he had bought, and experienced a sense of comfort from the words, 'I am the Vine, and ye are the branches.' He thought that if he trusted to Christ all would go well with him. The family spent a happy Sunday. There was food in the house, the father was sober; there was money enough to last with care till the next 'rhubarb. '
On the Monday morning he woke early, and went out as if to go to his regular work. When he found himself in the street something urged him, before looking for a job, to go to the scene of his last employment, the place at which work had so suddenly terminated on the Saturday. He was prepared for what he found there. The usual operations were going on, all his mates were at work; the sound of their toil filled the morning air.
He stood looking at the busy scene for a few moments, listening to the familiar sounds, watching the well-known figures, and feeling in his heart a certain bitterness which almost stirred him to the violence of anger. He walked away, feeling that the hand of every man was against him.
Here at the very outset of a new life was the world's oppugnance. His world would receive him if he came drunk and disreputable; while he remained religious and upright it closed its gates against him. The hatred of religion has many forms; none is so cruel as that which takes away the daily bread of the workman trying to be a better man.
Now began for the Plumber a martyrdom which searched his soul. Wherever he went he found that the story of his life had preceded him. There arc, apparently, few trades in London more closely knit and with ramifications more far-reaching and swift than this trade of
plumbing. A story concerning the trade flies to all corners of the metropolis; a man who gives offence becomes instantly known to mates whom he has never seen and whose names he has never heard. The poor Plumber discovered, wherever he went, that no one had work for him.
Very often he felt as if his heart would break, but never once did the temptation either to drink or to smoke visit his mind. Hungry, he felt no longing for the lulling stupefaction of tobacco; dejected and in despair, he felt no craving for the oblivionizing magic of alcohol. But a deepening melancholy settled on his mind, and again and again he had to remind himself of the words, 'I am the Vine, ye are the branches,' to keep alive in his heart the faith that God cared.
I want to make this picture clear and vivid in the reader's mind. Many times the out-of-work Plumber rose at five o'clock in the morning, and with nothing to sustain his physical energy except a glass of water, started out to tramp all day in quest of work. These tramps carried him sometimes as far as Harrow and Watford, well outside the boundaries of London; and he went steadily forward all the long day, with no other support than his glass of cold water and his religion. Sometimes, weary and heartsick, glancing forward and behind to see that he was not observed, this poor fellow would sink on his knees in the middle of a country road, and make his prayer, 'O God, don't forsake me!' And when his feet dragged and his body seemed about to collapse, he would lie down in a ditch, take his Testament from his pocket, and read some of those parables which declare that God does care, and cares greatly, for man and his sorrows. What a picture this presents to the mind! The professional tramp has put us out of sympathy with the respectable workman genuinely seeking employment; but consider this man, converted from depravity to selfrespect, this poor London workman trying to be a good man, kneeling in the dust of a country road, and reading the Galilaean parables in a Buckinghamshire ditch;
The home was only kept together during these difficult months by the incessant labour of the wife. Starvation was always at the door. The
man himself certainly lived in a state of starvation. And yet how can science explain the matter? In spite of mental misery and the terrible state of a body reduced to extreme weakness by starvation, not once did this ex-dipsomaniac feel any desire whatever either for tobacco or alcohol.
If ever a man was tempted to drink, if ever a man had justification for drinking, surely it was this poor hungry animal, tramping the roads and streets, day after day, week after week, month after month, and always in vain, seeking for work.
He tells me that he was not in the least conscious of religious exaltation. He derived comfort from singing hymns as he trudged along the road, and he was always aware of support when he repeated the words, 'I am the Vine, and ye are the branches,' but never did his heart sing with a great joy, never did he feel inclined to laugh at his troubles; never did ecstasy take him out of himself and make terrestrial life appear a small matter. Always he was a hungry man asking for work. He was now so devoted to the children, who had once feared him, that he could not prevent occasional bitterness at the reflection of his present lot; he wanted, God knew how he wanted, to make his home happy and bright; he would work hard from morning to night, he would save money, and never again waste a penny in drink, tobacco, gambling, and other vices; but there was no work for him. Alas, such is the fate of thousands of good men and capable tradesmen in modern civilization! At last he saw that he must abandon his trade and its high wages.
He might have gone to the 'Starvation Army' and got work, but something prevented him from bringing himself to live in this manner. Thousands and thousands of men working for the Army never have received a penny from its funds; they will not let their mates say that they turned religious in order to get work; they are very loyal to the honour of the religion which has saved them.
This tradesman, used to high wages and interesting work, hired himself out at last as what is called a common labourer. He ceased to
be a plumber. It was a hard step, but once taken he was glad. By hard work, careful economy, and enthusiasm for the home, he now lives a happy and contented life free of all regret, and only occasionally darkened by the anxiety of penury. He says, speaking of his home, 'Pictures hang on the walls; they used to hang on the wife's face.' Every day his eldest little girl goes to meet him at his work, and walks home with him; she was one of those who rushed under the bed for cover at the first sound of his step on the stair. He is a labourer, a sweeper of the London streets, and he is happy. The man's face is a Te Deum. His gratitude to God, his enthusiasm for conversion, his certain conviction that it is only religion which can reform the individual and the State, make him a tremendous worker among the lost and unhappy.