could read at all—and this was a lad of about fourteen, who had spent a few hours occasionally at a Board school. With all the others the knowledge that comes of reading was an absolute blank. They knew nothing, except that the proceeds of the previous week had been below the average; social events of surpassing interest had not reached them, and the future was limited by ‘to-morrow.’ We questioned them upon their experiences of the past winter, and the preference they had for their tents over houses was emphatically marked. ‘Brick houses,’ said one woman, who was suckling a baby, ‘are so full of draughts.’ Night and day the brazier of burning coke was never allowed to go low, and under the tent the ground was always dry, however wet it might be outside, because of the heat from the brazier; besides, they lay upon well-trodden-down straw, six or eight inches deep, and covered themselves with their clothes, their wraps, their filthy rugs, and tattered rags, and were as warm as possible. The tents had many advantages over a brick house. Besides having no draughts, there was no accumulation of snow upon the tops of the tents; and so these witless people were content to endure poverty, hunger, cold, and dirt for the sake of minimising their contribution to the general good of the whole commonwealth. The poorest working man in London who does an honest week’s work is a hero compared with such men as these. It would be impossible to nurture sentiment in any tent in Lamb-lane. There was no face with a glimmer of honest self-reliance about it, no face bearing any trace of the strange beauty we had noticed in other encampments, and no form possessed of any distinguishing grace. The whole of the yards were redolent of dirt; and the people, each and all, inexcusably foul in person. In several yards little boys or girls sat on the ground in the open air, tending coke fires over which stood iron pots, and, as the water boiled and raised the lids, it was plain that the women were taking advantage of the quiet hours of the afternoon for a wash. Before we came away from the last yard, lines had been strung across all the yards, and the hastily-washed linen rags were fluttering in the air. One tent was closed to visitors. It was then four o’clock, and a woman told us confidentially her friend was washing a blanket, which she would have to dry that same afternoon, as it would be ‘wanted’ at night; but ‘the friend’ professed her readiness to take charge of anything we had to spare for the washerwoman—a mouthful of baccy, a ‘sucker’ for the baby, or ‘three ha’pence for a cup of tea.’ Boys were there of fourteen and sixteen, with great rents in the knees of their corduroys, who only went out to hawk one day in the week—Saturday. They started with a light truck for Covent-garden at four in the morning, and would have from 4s. to 6s. to lay out in flowers. When questioned as to what flowers they had bought