A shed was erected in the corner of the composing-room, which served by night as a dormitory for numbers of otherwise roofless waifs, and here during the daytime a young Belgian and his wife set up a small factory of monkeys up sticks, which when completed they proceeded to sell in the streets. In another corner two Italians settled down to manufacture a remarkable new kind of artificial flower with which they traded when opportunity permitted. Small plaster-casts of Queen Victoria and Marat were also manufactured here. When the influx of starving Italians necessitated it, a kind of soup-kitchen was inaugurated over which Beppe presided, and very busy he was kept too, manufacturing _minestras_ and _polenta_, a welcome innovation to me, I may mention, after a long régime of small and nauseous tarts, bread and jam, and cheese. In short, the headquarters of the _Tocsin_, besides being a printing and publishing office, rapidly became a factory, a debating club, a school, a hospital, a mad-house, a soup-kitchen and a sort of Rowton House, all in one. When I look back on the scene now, and recall all the noise and hubbub, the singing, the discussions and disputes, the readings, the hammerings on this side, the hangings on that, the feeding, and M'Dermott's Shakespearian recitations, I find it very difficult to realise the amount of hard work which I and the other few serious and earnest comrades got through. The chief impediment to the progress of the work, however, was Short, the compositor. On close acquaintance with this creature, I found that he did not belie my first impression of him as the laziest and most slovenly of men; and I soon realised the two dominant characteristics which had made of him a Socialist--envy and sloth. So deeply was he imbued with envy that he was quite unable to rest so long as anyone else was better off than himself; and although he did not care one jot for "humanity" of which he prated so freely, and was incapable of regenerating a flea, he found in a certain section of the Socialist and Anarchist party that degree of dissatisfaction and covetousness which appealed to his degraded soul. Besides which the movement afforded him grand opportunities for living in sloth and sponging on other people. Short was not without his humorous side, however, when only you were in the right mood to appreciate it. His envy of the superiority which he noted in others was only equalled by his intense contempt for himself.