I came another day to another section of this world, approaching the East End via Aldgate and Commercial Road, and cutting through to Bethnal Green via Stepney. I found the same conditions--clean streets, low gray buildings, shabby people, a large museum whose chief distinction was that the floor of its central rotunda had been laid by women convicts!--and towering chimneys. So little life existed in the streets, generally speaking, that I confess I was depressed. London is so far flung. There were a great many Jews of Russian, Roumanian and Slavic extraction, nearly all bearing the marks of poverty and ignorance, but looking shrewd enough at that, and a great many physically deteriorated English. The long-bearded Jew with trousers sagging about his big feet, his small derby hat pulled low over his ears, his hands folded tightly across his back, was as much in evidence here as on the East Side in New York. I looked in vain for restaurants or show places of any kind (saloons, moving pictures, etc.). There were scarcely any here. This whole vicinity seemed to me to be given up to the poorest kind of living--sad, drab, gray. No wonder the policeman said to me: “Most of these people hereabouts have little enough to live on.” I’m sure of it. Finally, after a third visit, I consulted with another writer, a reputed authority on the East End, who gave me a list of particular neighborhoods to look at. If anything exceptional was to be detected from the appearance of the people, beyond what I have noted, I could not see it. I found no poor East End costers with buttons all over their clothes, although they once existed here. I found no evidence of the overcrowded home life, because I could not get into the houses to see. Children, it seemed to me, were not nearly so numerous as in similar areas in American cities. Even a police-court proceeding I saw in Avon Square was too dull to be interesting. I was told I might expect the most startling crimes. The two hours I spent in court developed only drunkenness and adultery. But as my English literary guide informed me, only time and familiarity with a given neighborhood would develop anything. I believe this. All I felt was that in such a dull, sordid, poor-bodied world any depth of filth or crime might be reached, but who cares to know? CHAPTER XV ENTER SIR SCORP During all my stay at Bridgely Level I had been hearing more or less--an occasional remark--of a certain Sir Scorp, an Irish knight and art critic, a gentleman who had some of the finest Manets in the world. He had given Dublin its only significant collection of modern pictures--in fact, Ireland should be substituted for Dublin, and for this he was knighted. He was the art representative of some great museum in South Africa--at Johannesburg, I think,--and he was generally looked upon as an authority in the matter of pictures.