It so happened that I made my first intimate acquaintance with the one real, publicly representative "Sailors' Home" in Well Street, near the London Docks, after having seen Jack under several of the terrible conditions just referred to, so that, with this painful knowledge of him and his ways, it was with a kind of delighted surprise that I suddenly walked into the great entrance-hall of the institution, where he and his fellows were sitting on the benches by the wall with the serious, contemplative, almost solemn air which is (in my experience) the common expression of sailors ashore, and during ordinary leisure hours. There they were, a good ship's crew of them altogether, sitting, as I have already said, in true sailor fashion—stooping forward, wrists on knees, lolling on sea-chests and clothes-bags, taking short fore-and-aft {61} walks of six steps and a turn in company with some old messmate, smoking, growling, chatting, and generally enjoying their liberty; not without an eye, now and then, to the smart officer who had come in to see whether he could pick up a brisk hand or two for the mail service. This was some five or six years ago, and it is a happy result of the plan on which the Home was first established (which was intended ultimately to make the institution self-supporting, if the cost of building were defrayed) that the whole scheme has been so enlarged since that time, that anybody who would see what our mercantile seamen are like, may now go and see them, in a largely increasing community, in this great institution. So many come and go and reappear at intervals represented by the length of their voyages, that 10,120 officers and men had partaken of its inestimable benefits during the year from the first of May, 1872, to the end of April, 1873. But the institution itself was founded in earnest faith, and built with the labour that is consecrated by prayer. Both to the Home and to its companion institution, the Refuge for Destitute Seamen—we will pay a visit on our next meeting. {62} WITH THEM WHO WERE READY TO PERISH. On the 28th of February, 1828, a very terrible calamity happened in the place known as Wellclose Square, Whitechapel. A new theatre called the Brunswick, had been erected there on the site of a former building, known as the Old Royalty. It had been completed in seven months, and three days afterwards, during a rehearsal, the whole structure gave way and fell with a crash, burying ten persons amidst the ruins, and fearfully injuring several others. Such a catastrophe was very awful, and the people of the neighbourhood looked with an almost solemn curiosity at the wreck of an edifice in which they themselves might have met with death suddenly.