"Did they swallow it down?" he asked.
"Like best butter," said Mr. Pigott. "He's got the tongue. He twisted em. Parliament's the place for Alf."
"Ah!" committed the other. "We're only beginning. This war'll find us all out too before we're through." ...
Alf turned into his yard.
A little group of broken down old men were waiting him there.
"Who are you?" he asked fiercely. "What you want?"
"We've come on behalf of the cleaners, sir," said the spokesman, in the uncertain voice of the half-starved. "What about us?—The Army don't want us."
The group tittered a feeble deprecatory titter.
"H'every man for himself in these days!" cried Alf, brief and brisk. "I'm not the Charity Organisation Society."
The old man, a-quaver in voice and body, doddered forward, touching his hat. Undersized and shrunken through starvation during infancy, and brutal usage throughout his growing years, he was an example of the great principle we Christians have enforced and maintained throughout the centuries: that the world's hardest work should be done by the weakest. Tip, as he was called, had been a coal-porter till at fifty-five he dislocated his shoulder shifting loads too heavy for him. Thereafter he was partially disabled, a casualty of the Industrial War, and to be treated as such.