This awful life of the slums, how strangely it acts and reacts upon our poor humanity! It brings out the worst, it brings out the best; it debases men and women, it ennobles them. Vice and misery ramp and crawl, but purity, love, and gentleness are not absent. Outstretched hands and suppliant looks tell that many are eager for the least boon that pity can bestow; but stern, unyielding independence is by no means an absent quality. But I must tell another story of the same summer-time and of the same locality, for my unknown friend, my match-box widow, and the poor blouse-maker lived within a few minutes’ walk of each other, and close by is a horrid, unclean court, and the sun poured its torrid rays into it. It is a very narrow court, and frowsy women from their doorsteps on either side can bandy words with each other. Sometimes they meet in the roadway, and fights are not unknown. Women of a positive character live in that court, and, coming home at two o’clock in the morning, make it hideous with their lewd and drunken blasphemies. Labouring men live there too, some of whom, on returning from work, find their wives drunk, and no semblance of an evening meal; then, heigho! for the crashing blow, the brutal kick, and the yell of the trampled wife. In a room on the ground-floor of one of the houses lies a woman waiting for death--death that tarries, for she has lain there for months--and was so long, so ‘unconscionably long in dying’ that her husband, by assaulting her, had tried to expedite the process, and was sent to prison for six months for his pains. Her little bed is underneath the window, close on to the pavement, and she can hear the wrangling of the women, the crying and quarrelling of the children, the blasphemy of the ‘unfortunate,’ the maudlin talk of the drunken wife, and the blow of the brutal husband. She has no respite from these things; neither has she any respite from pain, for she is in the last grip of internal cancer. She has been operated on twice in a London hospital, but there was no hope, so she said: ‘I will go home and die among my children.’ She has four of them, and the eldest is a girl of fourteen, who earns four shillings a week at a laundry. The husband no sooner receives his well-merited six months than out of a neighbouring workhouse comes an old woman of sixty-five, mother of the cancer-stricken woman. She enters into an agreement with a working-man, who has lost his wife, to keep house for him and look after his five children. Four shillings a week she is to receive for her onerous task. And every Saturday afternoon the old woman’s four shillings are added to the four earned by the girl, and not till the cancer has done its worst (or its best), not till the grave has closed over her daughter, not till the husband has come back to his children--not till then does the old woman seek again the shelter of the workhouse, there to wait for the rest and oblivion that has come to her daughter.