Yet, it is a mistake to suppose, as is more or less the popular theory, that the average East Ender's life is all unmitigated gloom. Take, for instance, the life of the honest, hard-working artisan and his family. He may live in "mean streets"; but use is everything; and they are not "mean" to him. Possibly, from his point of view, the two-pair back, the frowsy street, are "a sight more homely and cosy" than rich people's area gates and chilly grandeur. If the West End takes its pleasure by driving in the Park, the East, on the other hand, finds its relaxation on the tops of 'buses and trams, in walking about the flaring, gas-jetted street, in looking into shop windows, or in driving about in all the pride of a private, special coster's cart. If the rich do not know how the poor live, the poor, on the other hand, have but a hazy idea of how the rich live. If you asked the average slum-dweller how the rich spend their day, they would most likely say, "in drinking champagne and driving in motor cars." Thus the classes mutually do each other injustice. If the poor, for a while, could live the life of the rich, they would vote it terribly slow; Calverley was not so far out when he suggested slyly that "Unless they've souls that grovel, Folks _prefer_ in fact a hovel to your dreary marble halls." The poor of the East End have their special plays, their theatres, their "halls," their cheap popular amusements. And they have other minor compensations. They "eat hearty" when they do eat; they do not fall ill from dyspepsia or have to go to Carlsbad; or if they do suffer from M. Taine's favourite complaint, "the spleen" (which is unusual in a working man), they remedy it by a little harmless correction of their wives. Or if a poor woman's child is ill, she does not suffer for want of medical advice; she bundles it up quickly in a shawl, and runs with it to the nearest hospital, where, if the authorities are somewhat curt, she at any rate gets plenty of sympathy from all the other mothers in the big hospital waiting-room. Even that large, shabby crowd that, on visiting-days, await the opening of the hospital doors, so unutterably pathetic to the looker-on, is not, perhaps, without its alleviations. It is a mercy that we do not all like the same thing; and that, while the rich are exclusive, the poor will enjoy society of almost any kind: "We shall 'ave to leave our lodgin's, 'm, over them nice mews," a poor woman said to me lately, in a mournful tone. "The landlord, he's takin' the place down; an' I shall miss the 'orses' feet at night, somethin' shockin'; _they was sech comp'ny like_." Here, surely, is a case where one man's poison may be another man's meat!