For a whole week the fog and the drizzle continued as though no sun existed, or ever could exist. He wandered aimlessly, like a lost sheep, wondering how long a man could swallow quarts of dirt with his oxygen without getting permanently transformed into a human sewer. But he was getting a grip on things. His brain was gradually adapting itself to changed conditions. No longer did he gasp when a child in Stepney picked up orange-peel from the gutter and ate it. Here was the unending manifestation of Nature's inexorable law, the survival of the fittest, more clearly and cruelly displayed than in New York. Wealth and Poverty were more definitely marked. If they merged at all, it was away in the suburbs, or in the Jewish quarter, whence issued, on Saturdays, thousands of dark-skinned lads and girls, westward bound, to spend one hectic evening in the pleasure-ground west of St. Paul's. The East End, strangely enough, appealed to him more than the West. He took expeditions down among the docks, and sat in squalid public-houses listening to the coarse conversation of their habitues. There was always something new to shock, or interest, the eyes. It was no strange thing to find a woman performing certain domestic avocations before a pot of beer. Some of them brought potatoes and peas, peeling and shelling these in the bar in preference to the hovels which they inhabited. The "pub" was their club and general meeting-house. Once he managed to get into conversation with one of these products of "the hub of the Universe." Her point of view staggered him. Her meek acceptance of her lot sickened him. Why didn't she fly--she and her man--away to green fields and fresh air, away from this plague-ridden, dismal city? The suggestion brought from her a peal of mirthless laughter. Later he arrived at the truth. These people suffered from the greatest disease of all--_The Fear of Living_. Their hearts were rotten. They lived and died, rooted to some few acres of mud and muck because they feared what lay beyond. Like children they feared the unknown. Daylight lay beyond the jungle, but they believed it to be the pit of doom--of empty stomachs and endless tribulation. Nothing could be done for them until the system was smashed. Unsophisticated, uncultured as he was, he succeeded in grasping the root of the problem--Education. They were living a lie. The very environment conspired to perpetuate that lie. When one among them stood up and averred that Life meant something more than this, that Man was not made to eke out his life in bitter misery, that the result of the toil of the worker was filched by some inexplicable process, he was immediately voted "balmy." They were not ripe for fighting. There was as yet no clearly seen Cause that would rouse them from their torpor. But one day the flood would burst the dam of besotted ignorance, and the human cataract would descend with appalling force.