If you could see these bareheaded women, with their hanging hair, their ferocious eyes, their brutal mouths; if you could see them there, half dressed, and that in a draggle-tailed slovenliness incomparably horrible; and if you could hear their appalling language loading their hoarse voices, and from their phrases receive into your mind some impression of their modes of thought, you would say that human nature in the earliest and most barbarous of its evolutionary changes had never, could never, have been like this. Concerning the men, one thing only need be said.... There was cunning in their faces, there was every expression of ... underhand craft, but they looked and lowered their eyes.... They seemed to me 'consciously wrong, inferior, and unhappy.' But more than by anything concerning the men and women of this neighbourhood, one is impressed by the swarm of dreggy children playing their poor little pavement games in the shadow of these lodging-houses. Some--can it be believed?--are decently clothed and look as if they are sometimes washed.... The mass of these children, above five or six years of age, are terribly neglected. I have never seen children more dirty, more foully clothed, more dejected looking.... I saw many children with sores and boils; I saw some children whose eyes looked out at me from a face that was nothing but a scab. A mortuary chapel has had to be built for this neighbourhood. The rooms of the houses are so crowded that directly a person dies the body must be moved. Mr. Begbie now introduces Kate Lee:-- Into these streets come day after day, and every Sunday, the little, vigorous corps of The Salvation Army, stationed in this quarter of London. The Adjutant of the corps some years ago was a beautiful and delicate girl. She prayed at the bedside of dying men and women in these lodging-houses. She taught children to pray. She went into public-houses and persuaded the violent blackguards of the town to come away; she pleaded with the most desperate women at street corners; she preached in the open streets on Sundays; she stood guard over the doors of men, mad for drink, and refused to let them out. On one occasion this little woman was walking home through evil streets after midnight, when a drunken man asked her if he might travel by her side. After going some way the man said, 'No, you aren't afraid,' and then he mumbled to himself, 'Never insults the likes of you, because you cares for the likes of us.'