I always had a strong aversion to this man, but I continued to visit the home week by week, for which visits I had always to find some plausible excuse. I could see that he suspected me, and looked at me with a cunning eye. I found afterwards that he thought I was watching him, and believed that I should give evidence against him in case he ill-used his wife again. I encouraged this belief, for it helped to protect the wife, and he kept to his work. He got more comfort and better food, for the way to this man’s brain--I won’t say his heart--was through his stomach. Tracts and good advice, pleading or rebuke, would have been useless with him; I had to take him as he was. He was an animal, as an animal I had to treat him, and, the professor notwithstanding, I did not make a very bad job of him, for he keeps to work and keeps his hands off his wife, for which two things husband and wife are the better. Such husbands and such wives exist by the thousand. Stand outside our public-houses and take stock. You see a number of men, young and of middle age, loafing about, propping up the outside walls, waiting to be treated. Invariably these have wretched drudges of wives, whose lives and homes cannot be described. Hundreds of such fellows find their way into our courts. In the cells I see and speak to them, and am frequently asked to go to the places where their wives are at work, and get them to raise or borrow enough money to pay their fines. I have some comfort in thinking that I have never helped to shorten by one hour the imprisonment these fellows so richly deserve. This wife-beating among a certain class is so common that I have found plenty of wives who take it as a perfect matter of course, and some do not mind very much unless they are seriously damaged. But there are others with whom it is far different; and this leads me to speak of another class among whom I have found agony and anxiety, suffering and hopelessness, that cannot be imagined.