Presently a policeman came upon the scene, he ordered her, in a sharp angry tone, to move on. She looked tearfully at his face, saw no mercy there, and was about to leave the spot.
Leverall could bear it no longer—he gave her all the money he had with him, and walked quietly away without listening to her shrill and almost delirious exclamations of delight.
In ten minutes he regretted that he had not gone home for more money, but in ten minutes more he began to learn that it required unlimited means, boundless wealth, to relieve the distress one witnesses in certain parts of the metropolis.
Anxious to learn the worst he turned down the narrowest and darkest street he could find, where the shops were of the lowest and filthiest description, where the atmosphere was tainted as with a pestilence, where the streets were knee-deep in mud and putrid vegetables, where squalid children were paddling about, heedless of the unwholesome atmosphere and its surroundings.
Where all starved, and sinned, and drank—the men to nerve themselves for deeds of crime, the women to gain the high spirits and false smiles wherewith to deceive their victims, the children because their mothers taught them to, and because they were hungry.
It must be conceded that this picture is a repulsive one, but is nevertheless such as one sees in the noisome dens of the great city.
It is in vain to legislate for people of this class so long as their homes and the internal arrangements of their habitations remain as they are at the present period.
It is in vain to attempt to disguise the fact.
Mr. Leverall was in the midst of a populous district, where infants were born and old men and women died with no hand stretched out to feed their bodies, to ameliorate their condition of squalid misery, or to save their souls.
He saw enough in one day to convince him that there were thousands at home who were quite as demoralised as the savages abroad.