And, talking of screaming farce, I am reminded that we met Mr. J. L. Toole, and that he has not been introduced yet.
Room by all means, and at once for Mr. J. L. Toole—not the Toole of Toole's Theatre—the popular comedian who has made tomfoolery a fine art and burlesque a science, but his living, breathing image as he appeared to us, 'Mug,' voice, and gesture, at the door of a house at which we lately knocked in search of information as to the profits of hat-box making.
Our J. L. Toole didn't tell us anything as to these profits, though he was very funny—he cracked wheezes that even John Laurence himself might give off without blushing.
He suggested that while we were about it perhaps 'he might as well tell us who he worked for as how much he got, and then we could go round and offer to make hat-boxes a halfpenny a dozen under.' We didn't get much out of our J. L. Toole.
CHAPTER VIII.
One of the greatest evils of the overcrowded districts of London is the water-supply. I might almost on this head imitate the gentleman who wrote a chapter on 'Snakes in Iceland,' which I quote in its entirety—'There are no snakes in Iceland.' To say, however, that in these districts there is no water-supply would be incorrect, but it is utterly inadequate to the necessities of the people. In many houses more water comes through the roof than through a pipe, and a tub or butt in the back-yard about half full of a black, foul-smelling liquid supplies some dozens of families with the water they drink and the water they wash in as well. It is, perhaps, owing to the limited nature of the luxury that the use of water both internally and externally is rather out of favour with the inhabitants. As to water for sanitary purposes, there is absolutely no provision for it in hundreds of the most densely-inhabited houses. In the matter of water and air, the most degraded savage British philanthropy has yet adopted as a pet is a thousand times better off than the London labourer and his family, dwelling in the areas whose horrors medical officers are at last divulging to the public.
The difficulties of attaining that cleanliness which we are told is next to godliness may be imagined from a description of a water-butt which we found in the back-yard of a house containing over ninety people. The little boy in his shirtsleeves has come to fill his tin bowl, and we are indebted to him for the information that he wants it for his mother to drink. The mother is ill—has been for weeks; her lips are burning with fever, her throat is dry and parched, and this common reservoir, open to all the dust and dirt with which the air is thick, open to the draining in rainy weather of the filthy roof of the tumble-down structure beside it—this is the spring at which she is to slake her thirst. Is it any wonder that disease is rampant, or that the temperance folk have such trouble to persuade the masses that cold water is a good and healthy drink?
Remember, this is absolutely the supply for the day; it is, perhaps, turned on for about five minutes, and from this butt the entire inhabitants of the house must get all the water they want. In dozens of instances there is no supply at all—accident or design has interfered with it, and the housewife who wants to wash her child's face or her own, or do a bit of scrubbing, has to beg of a neighbour or make a predatory excursion into a back yard more blessed than her own.