The man in his shirt-sleeves--we can guess where the coat is--receives us courteously. His wife apologizes for the wretched condition of the room. Both of them speak with that unmistakable _timbre_ of voice which betokens a smattering of education. In the corner of the room is a heap of rags. That is the bed. There are two children, a boy and a girl, sitting on a bare hearth, and gazing into the fast-dying embers of a wretched fire. Furniture the room has absolutely none, but a stool roughly constructed of three pieces of unplaned wood nailed together. Four shillings a week is the rent of the cellar below the pie-shop; the foul smell arises from the gradual decay of the basement, and the utter neglect of all sanitary precautions. The man (who has only one arm) is out of work this week, he tells us, but he is promised a job next. To tide over till then is a work of some difficulty, but the 'sticks' and the 'wardrobe' of the family have paid the rent up to now. As to meals--well, they hain't got much appetite. The stench in which they live effectually destroys that. In this instance even bad drainage has its advantages, you see. Before the man lost his arm he was a clerk; without a right hand he is not much good as a penman in a competitive market. So he goes on as timekeeper in a builder's yard, as a messenger, or as anything by which he can get a few shillings for a living. The children have not been to school. 'Why?' asks the officer who accompanies us. 'Because they've no boots, and they are both ill now.' It is true. The children, pale, emaciated little things, cough a hard, rasping cough from time to time. To show us how bad they are they set up a perfect paroxysm of coughing until the mother fetches them a smack, and inquires 'how they expect the gentleman to hear himself speak if they kick up _that_ row?' The children's boots have gone with the father's coat, and at present it does seem hard to say that the parents must be fined unless the children come barefooted through the sloppy streets to school. Such, however, is the rule, and this boot question is an all-important one in the compulsory education of the children of the slums. How to get the boots for Tommy and Sarah to go their daily journey to the Board School is a problem which one or two unhappy fathers have settled by hanging themselves behind the domestic door. The difficulties which the poor have in complying with the demands of the Education Act are quite unsuspected by the general public. They are so numerous, and the histories revealed by their investigation are so strange, that I propose in the next chapter to ask the reader to accompany me to a meeting at which the parental excuses for non-attendance are made. This is a meeting at which the parents who have been 'noticed' for the non-attendance of their children adduce what reasons they can why they should not be summoned before a magistrate.