{25} There were, even at that later time, old men and women in the dim old building who could repeat family legends of the emigration—for they lived to a great age, these French folk, many of them being still alert of eye and ear, and foot, even though they had heard the click of the shuttle and the rattle of the loom eighty years before. Some of them have survived the old place itself; for while they are in a new home, the ancient building has changed, if even it be not altogether dismantled. The leases paid good interest, and eight years ago a new French hospital arose—away from the dingy old precinct of the Golden Acre. To see this later "Providence" aright, you must come through the very heart of that neighbourhood which was once the great Silk Colony, thread the bye-ways of Poverty Market, note the tall silent houses where the looms no longer rattle, nor the sharp whirr of the shuttle stirs cage-birds to sing; pass across the debatable land lying on the edge of Shoreditch, where human beings live in sties built in the backyards of other houses, in streets that are still with the blank silence of misery and want. You should walk amidst pigeon and dog fanciers; call in at certain dingy, slipshod taverns, where at night a slouching company will meet to hear bullfinches pipe for wagers, and where starving men and women stand and drink away the pence that are all too few to buy food for the starving brood at home, and so are flung upon the sloppy counter in exchange for the drugged drink that feels like food and fire in one. Through Bethnal Green, with its "townships" and its "Follies," extending in sordid rows of tenements built to one dreary pattern. Over districts which, only a few years ago, {26} were fields and open spaces, leading to farm lands and hedgerows, and so away to the great expanse of marsh land where the dappled kine wade knee-deep in the lush pastures, and the stunted pollards stand like patient fishermen upon the river's brink.