No fiction--no tale of imagination--but true! true! true! Not in the past times, before there were visitations, and poor-law boards, and plenty of missionary enterprise, but now--now, within the past few days--in Christian England, whose wealth makes the fabled greatness of the East turn pale and shine with diminished lustre. Here--at home--in our great city--lying down to die, listening to the hurrying tramp of thousands; with help ready to come when it was too late; with coroner and jury ready to sit, and wag their sapient heads, and the twelve to smoke it in their pipes in the evening, saying, "How dreadful!" The coroner saying, too, that such things came before him weekly. And what is done to amend the misery? Where is the plaister for this hideous boil? There was no canting whine here for aid, but the act of the stricken one who knew full well that she would be told to go to the House,--than enter which she would sooner die. "I'd have taken her a drop of brandy if I'd known how bad she was; but, poor soul, she always kep herself to herself." God bless you for it, woman! You told me with an earnestness and truthful air that none could doubt: it was the fruition of that loving sympathy that prompts the poor to give of their little to aid distress. Where does the beggar make his harvest? Where do the canting hypocrites who trade upon sympathy fatten? Amidst the thronging streets of East and South London, finding the heart that has felt the pinchings of poverty ever ready to open in their favour. But such sad tales need veiling, 'neath the medium of fiction, and one seeks again to soften the tale. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ I see it all, as I said, and at last, seeing it less and less plain for something as came in my eyes, I picked up my paste-tin and my brush, and then made towards the door; but I was obliged to go back and have another look, for the thought come as it might have been a sister, or a mother, or--or--or--I broke down there; for I said to myself as it might have been a widder, and that widder might have been mine. But the thoughts of that made me start again and hurry out of the place, with a will and a spirit in me to have posted up all London, if I could have got the job; and short work I made of what else I had to do. But there in my pipe that night was that worn-out seamstress, whose calm, sleeping face cried out so appealingly--crying in a way that should make all London shudder: "Brother, I was starved to death!" CHAPTER TWENTY FOUR. CAST ASHORE.