The foreman had several blacksmiths and wheelwrights working under him. He showed me two carts they had built and some trucks for the Salvage Brigade, with an excellent arrangement for carrying bottles. In the same Elevator they make the mattresses for all their establishments and in another department men were at work picking rags. One department was devoted to the care of the engines in all the stations. At the Elevator where the bunks are made they also make good simple furniture, all the benches used at the halls and other plain things. I saw here some fine chairs carved by hand, the work of an ivory carver. They could not furnish the man with ivory, so they gave him oak. The difficulty of selling his work has not yet been met. The manufacturers are jealous and will not allow such high-class goods to be put on the market.

Woman’s Shelter, Hanbury Street, Whitechapel. Here women may sleep and have tea and breakfast. For meals twopence each, for a night’s lodging the same. No questions asked. They must be indoors before eleven o’clock. The women are very reserved and reticent. They are from the lowest part of the community. Many old women in pitiful rags and tatters. Some have to be called at one o’clock in the morning to go to the markets, where they earn a few pence by picking over fruit. The shelters are kept 60 to 65 degrees Fahrenheit. The mere warmth is often enough to keep life in bodies weakened by hunger and cold. The long room is filled with bunks, or rather boxes. At one of the shelters men were at work making these sleeping boxes, carefully painted and enameled, the superintendent told me, as a protection against vermin. Inside each bunk are a leather-covered mattress and pillow, but no bedding.

A smaller room leading from the large one is reserved for women with children. I visited the crêche where, by paying a small fee, mothers can leave their children for the day. I saw one of the Slum Posts. The two Lassies in charge were gentlewomen, the daughters of a well-known Church of England clergyman. Their post is in the worst quarter of London.

“No one ever annoys us; we go in parts of the town where no one else could go safely. No one would hurt a Salvation Army Lassie,” they said.

At one of the shelters the women may wash their clothes Tuesday and Friday evenings. Tubs and hot water are provided gratis; the women must bring their own soap.

My interest in the Salvation Army began one hot Sunday afternoon some time in the eighties, at the home of my sister, Laura Richards, in Gardiner, Maine. Looking out in the street, I saw a man beating a drum and a girl with a blue bonnet shaking a tamborine.

“What on earth are those lunatics about?” some one asked. We followed them down to the main street and listened to their simple service of song and prayer. Though this proceeding seemed incongruous in that quiet Maine town, it interested me. The Salvation Army met with that bitterest of all opposition, ridicule. But the more I studied the methods of the Army in London, the more convinced I became that it represented one of the greatest moral forces of my time. At a period when business men were beginning to talk about “by-products” and manufacturers to realize that the by-product was sometimes as important as all the rest of the plant, General Booth was developing the by-product of mankind and turning the wastrels of the race into profitable citizens. On my return to America I was so angered at hearing his methods pooh-poohed that I wrote a lecture describing what I had seen of the Army’s work. Under the management of Major Pond I gave this lecture, “With Booth in Darkest England”, far and wide. I am glad to think that my voice may have had some small influence in bringing about a better understanding of the Salvation Army in our country.

CHAPTER XVII
Arabian Days

It was in the early days of 1894 that J. and I set sail for Italy, whither his work called him, and that on the way I beguiled him into one of our merriest adventures.

“Our tickets allow us to stop over here for a week,” I whispered as the steamer’s anchor chain rattled through the hawseholes and the lights of Gibraltar glittered like golden fireflies fluttering over the huge Rock.