But we hear voices all around us. Listen! Fast young men are exchanging coarse obscenities with that group of ‘unfortunates,’ and no one says them nay; Listen! Business men are cursing the delay of the magistrate and the impertinence of the police, for they want to pay their fines and be gone. Listen! You hear a girl of tender years bitterly crying; you hear a doddering old woman talking to herself; you hear knowing men proclaiming the iniquities of the police; you hear the loud laugh that tells the life-history of the laugher. You hear someone faintly ask for water. Look at him, a well-dressed, middle-aged man, shaking in every limb as with palsy; he is nearly in delirium tremens. How the water gurgles down his hot throat! He does not know his name, he cannot tell whence he comes, and when put into the cells the furies will be with him and upon him. You hear someone crooning snatches of good music. She has been here fifty times, a woman from a home of culture. She is half drunk now, and the old songs come back to her, although she has got to the lowest depth and rolls with pleasure in her sensual sty. ‘Anybody got a smelling bottle?’ They might as well ask for the moon, and so the decent-looking woman faints, and well she may. It is her first appearance here. She has been picked up drunk. Shame and fear, horror and sickness, take hold of her. No female attendant, so the unfortunates take off her bonnet, unfasten the front of her dress, and rub her hands till she slowly recovers her dreadful consciousness. Here is a group of boys charged with gambling; here a couple of fourteen-year-old girls with being disorderly; here a mother and her babe; here a young clerk charged with embezzlement; here the old couple from the workhouse whose every returning holiday from ‘the house’ finds them in the public-house. Mix them up, old and young, pure and impure, male and female, drunk and sober, cleanly and verminous. Dante ought to have seen that room, have tasted that atmosphere, have listened to the various sounds in major and in minor keys. All the social problems of the day were in that room, all the vices and sorrows of life were personified in it. This is no exaggerated picture, not in the least is it overdrawn; I do not wish to give fuller particulars, I dare not if I would. No publisher would publish, no printer would print, an exactly faithful account of a prisoners’ waiting-room of even twelve years ago. ‘Rescue them,’ said my employers, ‘and the last day of every month a small cheque shall be your reward.’ ‘How am I to do it?’ ‘Here’s a temperance pledge-book; take pledges.’ ‘But there are others.’ ‘Give them tracts.’ ‘But there are the hungry and homeless to feed.’ ‘Give them tracts.’ ‘There are the poor wantons.’ ‘Take them to rescue homes, and let them work out their own salvation at the wash-tubs.’