It is not necessary to give a detailed description of Lambeth Court, but it may be pointed out how the place instantly struck Paul strategically. It was not too far from the Hall, he saw at once, to make the work of carrying the harmonium too heavy; every corner of its area could be reached with a powerful voice; in the very centre stood a lamp-post, and, what was more, that lamp-post stood alone in its glory in the Court. This condition offered two great advantages: first, that of supplying all the light required for the evangelists, and secondly, that of creating those dark shadows beyond beloved by Nicodemus and his like. The railway arch through which one entered and which shut off that end of the place, would, of course, occasionally vibrate with trains--an item on the debit side of the account; but on the other hand the filthy tumbling hovels were enclosed on three sides by hoardings and tall blank warehouse walls which would catch the voice, and their strips of refuse-strewn gardens, separated from each other by broken palings, were just such as would invite the inhabitants to sit and gossip there on summer and early autumn evenings. Paul noted all this in a moment so soon as he was inside the arch. He was a born evangelist. But to do the boy justice, he noted far more than this. He saw the slatternly woman, with an unspeakable gaping blouse, her hair in curl-papers and her feet in bulging unlaced boots, who came to the door of the first cottage and shouted at a flaxen-haired little toddler of a girl playing with a matchbox in the gutter. The burning words fell on his ears like a scream from hell. "Maud-Hemily, yer bloody little bitch, come in out o' that muck or I'll smack your bottom for yer." He saw the two men by the lamp-post look at him, and he read aright their besotted faces. Neither spoke, but one spat well and truly at the base of the pillar, and that did for speech. He rapped on the door of No. 5, and when Jimmie opened it, he saw the remains of a meal in greasy newspapers on the filthy table, and his nostrils caught the smell of unwashed clothes and Sunday morning's kippers. He tried to avoid the wall as he went up the stairs. And when he was in the little overhead bedroom, whose window never opened and through whose grimy glass one read an advertisement of Reckitt's Blue on the hoarding opposite, and stood by the side of a heap of blankets and sacks on which lay and coughed a child of thirteen in consumption, a cracked article on a chair by her bedside over which she occasionally leaned and expectorated, his heart moved with something of that compassion which had been the outstanding characteristic of the greatest Evangelist the world has ever known. He was more silent than his wont at the midday dinner. But when Saturday's hot joint, cold on Sundays, had been removed, he looked across the table to the clergyman at its head, and spoke. "Dad," he said, "do you know Lambeth Court?"