We strove to help him through;
But now we cannot help ourselves—
We have no work to do.
The systematic writers of begging letters are also much more common in London than in the country, and rejoice in the name of “highflyers.”
Year after year they invent new cases with different hands, and sometimes their wives or mistresses, where they are known themselves, present their “appeal,” and thus avoid detection, and collect an abundant revenue for the sins as well as the necessaries of life.
Well would it be for society at large if the vagrants of Great Britain were confined to these impostors. The remedy would be easy. Their extinction by imprisonment and transportation would not be difficult.
But alas! mixed up with these untrue and unreal appeals to the sympathy of our nature are thousands and tens of thousands of cases where sickness, accidents, death, want of work, inadequate wages, and the other ills of life to which sorrowing man is heir, have given to the squalid, starving, wretched, and abused applicants the right to ask for food, or to seek in the “unions” they so much abhor the bread of existence.
Joe Doughty had been accustomed throughout his life to fare but roughly. He had, however, never made the acquaintance of a low lodging-house, and did not, therefore, know the habits and manners of the people who are accustomed to patronise establishments of this description.
When he arrived in front of the inhospitable looking place known as the “Travellers’ Rest,” he hesitated. All was as still as death. Joe’s courage appeared to fail him, and he was half inclined to go back to Mr. Wrench.
The balance was turned in an opposite direction in a few seconds. “A cadger on the fly” (a beggar on the road) with his female companion and three children came up, and made straight for the door.