How well I remember the day Mr. Barnett and I first came to see it!--a sulky sort of drizzle filled the atmosphere; the streets, dirty and ill kept, were crowded with vicious and bedraggled people, neglected children, and overdriven cattle. The whole parish was a network of courts and alleys, many houses being let out in furnished rooms at 8d. a night--a bad system, which lent itself to every form of evil, to thriftless habits, to untidiness, to loss of self-respect, to unruly living, to vicious courses. We did not “hurry in our decision,” but just before Christmas, 1872, Mr. Barnett became vicar. A month later we were married, and took up our life-work on 6 March, 1873, accompanied by our friend Edward Leonard, who joined us, “to do what he could”; his “could” being ultimately the establishment of the Whitechapel Committee of the Charity Organization Society, and a change in the lives and ideals of a large number of young people, whom he gathered round him to hear of the Christ he worshipped. It would sound like exaggeration if I told my memories of those times. The previous vicar had had a long and disabling illness, and all was out of order. The church, unserved by either curate, choir, or officials, was empty, dirty, unwarmed. Once the platform of popular preachers, Mr. Hugh Allen, and Mr. (now Bishop) Thornton, it had had huge galleries built to accommodate the crowds who came from all parts of London to hear them--galleries which blocked the light, and made the subsequent emptiness additionally oppressive. The schools were closed, the schoolrooms all but devoid of furniture, the parish organization nil; no Mothers’ meeting, no Sunday School, no communicants’ class, no library, no guilds, no music, no classes, nothing alive. Around this barren empty shell surged the people, here to-day, gone to-morrow. Thieves and worse, receivers of stolen goods, hawkers, casual dock labourers, every sort of unskilled low-class cadger congregated in the parish. There was an Irish quarter and a Jews’ quarter, while whole streets were given over to the hangers-on of a vicious population, people whose conduct was brutal, whose ideal was idleness, whose habits were disgusting, and among whom goodness was laughed at, the honest man and the right-living woman being scorned as impracticable. Robberies, assaults, and fights in the street were frequent; and to me, a born coward, it grew into a matter of distress when we became sufficiently well known in the parish for our presence to stop, or at least to moderate, a fight; for then it seemed a duty to join the crowd, and not to follow one’s nervous instincts and pass by on the other side. I recall one breakfast being disturbed by three fights outside the Vicarage. We each went to one, and the third was hindered by a hawker friend who had turned verger, and who fetched the distant policeman, though he evidently remained doubtful as to the value of interference.