I walked long distances through such streets as Old Montague, King Edward, Great Carden, Hope, Brick Lane, Salesworthy, Flower, Dean, Hare, Fuller, Church Row, Cheshire, Hereford,--a long, long list, too long to give here, coming out finally at St. John’s Catholic Church at Bethnal Green and taking a car line for streets still farther out. I had studied shops, doorways, areas, windows, with constant curiosity. The only variation I saw to a dead level of sameness, unbroken by trees, green places or handsome buildings of any kind, were factory chimneys and endless charitable institutions covering, apparently, every form of human weakness or deficiency, but looking as if they were much drearier than the thing they were attempting to cure. One of them I remember was an institution for the orphans of seamen, and another a hospital for sick Spanish Jews. The lodging-houses for working-girls and working-boys were so numerous as to be discouraging and so dreary looking that I marveled that any boy or girl should endure to live in them. One could sense all forms of abuse and distress here. It would spring naturally out of so low a grade of intelligence. Only a Dickens, guided by the lamp of genius, could get at the inward spirit of these, and then perhaps it would not avail. Life, in its farthest reaches, sinks to a sad ugly mess and stays there. One of the places that I came upon in my perambulations was a public washhouse, laundry and bath, established by the London County Council, if I remember rightly, and this interested me greatly. It was near Winchester Street and looked not unlike a low, one-story, factory building. Since these things are always fair indications of neighborhoods, I entered and asked permission to inspect it. I was directed to the home or apartment of a small martinet of a director or manager, quite spare and dark and cockney, who frowned on me quizzically when he opened his door,--a perfect devil of a cheap superior who was for putting me down with a black look. I could see that it was one of the natives he was expecting to encounter. “I would like to look over the laundry and baths,” I said. “Where do you come from?” he asked. “America,” I replied. “Oh! Have you a card?” I gave him one. He examined it as though by some chance it might reveal something concerning me. Then he said if I would go round to the other side he would admit me. I went and waited a considerable time before he appeared. When he did, it was to lead me with a very uncertain air first into the room filled with homely bath closets, where you were charged a penny more or less--according to whether you had soap and towel or not--and where the tubs were dreary affairs with damp-looking wooden tops or flanges, and thence into the washroom and laundry-room, where at this time in the afternoon--about four o’clock--perhaps a score of women of the neighborhood were either washing or ironing.