The new-comer said to himself, "I wonder whether you would soon get over it if you had been taken from your mother and parted from a young brother?" How long he stayed in the workhouse school he has never been able to tell. It could not have been very long in point of time, but to the sensitive lad it seemed an age. An indescribable burden was lifted from his shoulders when one day at dinner someone called him by his name. He sprang to his feet. "Go to the tailor's shop after dinner and get your own clothes." "What for, sir?" "You are going home!" His heart leapt up. The boys crowded round him, wishing they were in his place. Poor miserable lads, he parted from them with feelings of the deepest pity. At the gate he met his young brother and sisters again, and they were taken back to Poplar, to be welcomed with open arms by their mother. She had worked harder than ever to add to the family income in order to justify her in going before the Guardians to ask that her children be restored to her own keeping. Not until thirty-three years later could he command the courage to enter that same workhouse school again. Many changes for the good had been made, but the sight of the same hall, with the same peculiar odour, brought back the same old feeling of utter friendlessness and despair. And he saw in imagination a sad-faced boy sitting on the form, straining his eyes in the vain search for his young brother. The mother had moved to a cheaper room when the children returned home from the workhouse school. It was in a small house in the High Street, next door to the entrance to the casual ward, with the main workhouse building in the rear. This was Will's home for the rest of his boyhood. There, with the workhouse surrounding him as it were, he got daily glimpses of the misery that hovers round the Poor Law. Men and women would sit for hours huddled on the pavement in front of his home waiting for the casual ward to open. Will came bounding out of the house in the dull dawn to go to work as an errand boy one morning, when he kicked violently against a bundle of rags on the pavement. There was a cry of pain in a woman's voice, and the lad pulled up sharp, filled with remorse: "I'm _so_ sorry, missus; I am really. I didn't see you." "All right, kiddie. I saw you couldn't help it. I'm used to being kicked about the streets." But the lad could not forget it. And when he came home at dinner-time, "Oh, mother," he said, "I kicked a poor woman outside our door this morning, and I wouldn't have done it for anything, had I known." Sometimes a poor wayfarer would knock at the door, mistaking it for the entrance to the casual ward. In answer to a series of sharp raps one night Will raced to the door with the mother of another family who rented the front room. She got there first and opened it, to find a tramp on the step. "Is this the casual ward?"