We began our work very quietly and simply: opened the church (the first congregation was made up of six or seven old women, all expecting doles for coming), restarted the schools, established relief committees, organized parish machinery, and tried to cauterise, if not to cure, the deep cancer of dependence which was embedded in all our parishioners alike, lowering the best among them and degrading the worst. At all hours, and on all days, and with every possible pretext, the people came and begged. To them we were nothing but the source from which to obtain tickets, money, or food; and so confident were they that help would be forthcoming that they would allow themselves to get into circumstances of suffering or distress easily foreseen, and then send round and demand assistance. I can still recall my emotions when summoned to a sick woman in Castle Alley, an alley long since pulled down, where the houses, three stories high, were hardly six feet apart; the sanitary accommodation--pits in the cellars; and the whole place only fit for the condemnation it got directly Cross’s Act was passed. This alley, by the way, was in part the cause of Cross’s Act, so great an impression did it make on Lord Cross (then Mr. Cross) when Mr. Barnett induced him to come down and see it. In this stinking alley, in a tiny dirty room, all the windows broken and stuffed up, lay the woman who had sent for me. There were no bedclothes; she lay on a sacking covered with rags. “I do not know you,” said I, “but I hear you want to see me.” “No, ma’am!” replied a fat beer-sodden woman by the side of the bed, producing a wee, new-born baby; “we don’t know yer, but ’ere’s the babby, and in course she wants clothes, and the mother comforts like. So we jist sent round to the church.” This was a compliment to the organization which represented Christ, but one which showed how sunken was the character which could not make even the simplest provision for an event which must have been expected for months, and which even the poorest among the respectable counts sacred. The refusal of the demanded doles made the people very angry. Once the Vicarage windows were broken, once we were stoned by an angry crowd, who also hurled curses at us as we walked down a criminal-haunted street, and howled out as a climax to their wrongs “And it’s us as pays ’em”. But we lived all this down, and as the years went by reaped a harvest of love and gratitude which is one of the gladdest possessions of our lives, and is quite disproportionate to the service we have rendered. But this is the end of the story, and I must go back to the beginning.