I paid no further visits to the ‘Gubbins’; they knew too much for me, and my last visit has been paid to Arcadia, for Hackney Wick knows it no more. I saw the last of it, and a sad and singular sight it was. The inhabitants were being ‘moved off.’ For months they had lived in their unclean simplicity, with no sanitary arrangements, and cut off from clean water. It was one dull day at the latter end of April; the rain fell gently all the day long, and the atmosphere was of a leaden hue. They had struck their tents, and were packing up when I got there, so I waited to see the last of them. My friends the midgets had packed their few boards, some sacking, an old kettle and saucepan, etc., on the barrow, and the little man pushing it, with his sister carrying her two babes--for the younger one had kept her word, and, with her bit of humanity, had gone into the workhouse--moved off in the dull mist, but where I never knew, for they would give me no information on the subject. The three young women had already gone. The poor fellow and his wife had their belongings on a wheelbarrow, and were ‘moving off.’ The caravans, with their ancient horses and numerous children, ‘moved off.’ Tent after tent was struck; in different directions the occupants ‘moved off,’ and Arcadia was no more. CHAPTER XII HOW THE POOR LIVE--AND DIE One hot afternoon in July, in the hottest year of recent times, a man of about thirty-five years of age sat on a chair outside a very poor house in a very mean street of Hackney Wick. There was not a breath of air stirring, and, though the sun shone brilliantly, and the street was redolent with unsavoury smells, the poor fellow found the rays of the sun and the smells of the street preferable to the insufferably close atmosphere of the very little room--first floor back--in which he had lived for the last eighteen months. I had just come from a room where misery, poverty, and marvellous heroism had been strikingly illustrated. I neither saw the man nor smelt the unsavoury odours, for I was thinking of what I had seen, when I heard a faint but choking cough--one that told its story. I looked and stopped, and found myself face to face with the man on the chair.