How these people live is a mystery. It is a wonder that they are not found dead in their wretched dens, for which they pay a rent out of all proportion to their value, by dozens daily. But they live on, and the starving children come day after day to school with feeble frames and bloodless bodies, and the law expects them to learn as readily as well-fed, healthy children, and to attain the same standard of proficiency in a given time.
It is these starving children who are not allowed to earn money towards their support until they are thirteen, and in many cases fourteen. Less necessitous children, as a rule, pass out of school earlier, for reasons which will be obvious to anyone who reflects for a moment upon the relationship of a healthy brain to a healthy body.
In another chapter we shall hear a few more personal narrations at a 'B' meeting. I will conclude this one with a story of a young gentleman whose excuse for non-attendance is at least dramatic. He has been absent for six weeks, and his mother explains, 'It's all along of 'is aven a reg'lar engagement at the Surrey Pantermine, and there hev been so many matynees.'
'He's on the Surrey, is he?' says the chairman.
'Perhaps that's the reason he can't pass the Standard!'
We see the joke and chuckle, but the boy doesn't. Evidently his pantomime training has been thrown away upon him.
CHAPTER V.
The ladies and gentlemen whom I had the pleasure of introducing to you in the last chapter had, most of them, some good and sufficient excuse for the non-attendance of their children at school. Before the 'B' meeting at which we assisted was over, more than one case was examined which left the official no option but to take out a summons and run the risk of one of those amiable lectures which unthinking magistrates now and again see fit to bestow upon the luckless officer of the Board who has done what the law compels him to do, and no more.