"Why," said he, "there's our sink bin stopped up nigh on three weeks, and he ain't bin round yet!" All who labour and are poor in Poplar look upon Crooks as the unfailing friend. The coal-man crying coals in the street all in vain, one morning hails him in passing:-- "Wot's wrong with people this morning, Mr. Crooks? One would think I was selling tombstones!" Another day it is the chimney-sweep who stops him. "Talk about the County Council's schools in Poplar, Mr. Crooks; I calls it a scandal, I does." "What's the matter?" "Sending their chimbleys up to Bethnal Green to be swept instead of employing local labour!" The callers at his house were in no sense confined to his neighbours. One day it would be C. B. Fry, the cricketer, another day G. K. Chesterton the critic--neither of them for the first time; and again George R. Sims, Beerbohm Tree, Lord and Lady Denbigh, Miss Gertrude Tuckwell, Father Adderley, Bernard Shaw, Earl Carrington, and the Rev. Charles Sheldon from the United States--to mention but a few of the men and women of widely different walks of life who are pleased to number him among their friends. Mr. Sheldon called soon after the great boom of "In His Steps." On several occasions Crooks piloted him through the slums of the East End. While looking round a typical court the American minister asked one of the women when they had seen a parson there. The answer came, "We ain't seen no parson down here since we lived here, fifteen years." "I don't wonder that people are bad," remarked Mr. Sheldon to Crooks. "The wonder is that people are so good as they are." Before returning to America Mr. Sheldon sent Crooks a parting note, ending, "I shall always remember you as you stand, 'in the thick of it,' for the rights of little children and brother men." Outsiders who visit Crooks find him precisely the same man as his neighbours find him. He has personal friends in the Peers' House as well as in the Poor's House, but his manner changes not in the company of either. This characteristic trait in Crooks led Mr. Chesterton, in his book on "Charles Dickens," into an instructive comparison:--