The terror of frost to these creatures is great indeed. Frost is the King of Terrors to them--not Death; they sleep and live with death constantly, the dead frequently in the room with the living, and with the unborn that is near birth. Alere's ten pounds helped them. The drunkard's wife knew that Flamma, the drinker, would certainly give her the silver in his pocket. The ragged urchins, battling for a knot of pine-wood, knew that they could charm the pennies and the threepenny bits out of his waistcoat; the baked potatoes and the roasted chestnuts looked so nice on the street stove. Wretched girls whose power of tempting had gone, and with it their means of subsistence, begged, and not in vain, of shaky Alere Flamma. There are many of these wretches in Fleet Street. There is no romance about them to attract the charity of the world. Once a flower-girl, selling flowers without a licence in the street, was charged by the police. How this harshness to the flower-girl--the human representation of Flora--roused up sentiment in her behalf! But not every starving girl has the fortune to rouse up sentiment and to be fed. Their faces disfigured with eruptions, their thin shoulders, their dry, disordered hair--hair never looks nice unless soft with its natural oil--their dingy complexions, their threadbare shawls, tempt no one. They cannot please, therefore they must starve. The good turn from them with horror--Are they not sin made manifest? The trembling hand of Alere fed them. Because the boys bawl do you suppose they are happy? It is curious that people should associate noise with a full stomach. The shoeblack boys, the boys that are gathered into institutions and training ships, are expected to bawl and shout their loudest at the annual fêtes when visitors are present. Your bishops and deans forthwith feel assured that their lives are consequently joyous. Why then do they set fire to training ships? Why do they break out of reformatory institutions? Bawling is not necessarily happiness. Yet fatuous fools are content if only they can hear a good uproar of bawling. I have never walked up Fleet Street and the Strand yet without seeing a starving woman and child. The children are indeed dreadful; they run unguarded and unwatched out of the side courts into the broader and more lively Strand--the ceaseless world pushes past--they play on the pavement unregarded. Hatless, shoeless, bound about with rags, their faces white and scarred with nameless disease, their eyes bleared, their hair dirty; little things, such as in happy homes are sometimes set on the table to see how they look. How _can_ people pass without seeing them? Alere saw them, and his hand went to his waistcoat pocket.