TO RETURN THE COFFIN
and its accompaniments to the undertaker. He learned that same morning that the widower’s plea of poverty was, as it often proved to be with the occupants of those slum-tenements, a mere pretence. The bereaved descendant of Irish royalty had $12 due on that week’s work, besides $39 in a savings bank. The man returned the coffin, etc., that morning to the undertaker, telling him that his reverence Mr. ⸺ thought it not good enough for the lady, and that a twenty-dollar coffin should be sent, along with a hearse and two carriages. For payment Mr. ⸺ would be accountable; the widower had agreed to repay him by weekly instalments. The ingenious ruse did not succeed, for the undertaker went straight to Mr. ⸺. Whereon the disappointed and bereaved husband went on a week’s hard drink. The body would have been left unburied, had not Mr. ⸺ ordered back the original cheap coffin and seen to the interment. This is the most typical case of one type of pauperism peculiar, I believe, to the lowest type of Irish and English paupers. It is not the opinion of this clergyman that such abject forms of mean and servile ingratitude are found among the most degraded class of our native Canadian tramps. It results from social conditions which exist in the old country but not here.
Another instance related by Mr. ⸺ illustrates what has been said already about drunkenness being at once the source and the solace of so many of the slum miseries; it is the atmosphere of their life, the pabulum on which they feed, the destroyer for whom they sacrifice wife, child, and finally life. The slum drunkenness is not that of the graceful orgies of an opera scene—it is terribly realistic, it is the sullen sodden ivresse of our Canadian rendering of L’Assomoir?
I proceed to tell Mr. ⸺’s terrible but true tale of women drunk on the floor at a funeral. Mr. ⸺ was asked to undertake to read prayers at a house in a lane out of one of the streets in St. John’s ward. On reaching the house he found every preparation duly made, a hearse at the door, a plain black-painted shell, with the body duly laid out within it on a table. The people in the room were