Here is the voice of the Tramp as he appears to himself: full of complacency as he looks back upon his past successes: naked before his audience, and entirely unashamed. In the revelation of the submerged as they appear to others--to those friends of theirs who possess sympathy and humour and a wide acceptance--this subterranean existence appears also full of excellent things: comradeship, kindliness, laughter, and tears. Such vivid and truthful writing as that of Mr. Neil Lyons in _Arthurs_ throws no unfriendly light upon the waste places of the city. He has taken for the scene of his inquiry a London coffee-stall “somewhere between Brixton and the obelisk in South London.” “This is an ambiguous direction,” he declares. “But then we night-seekers are jealous of our ill-fame, and the fear of the Oxford movement is strong upon us.” Round this coffee-stall, attracted like moths to a candle, gather in the heart of the sleeping city those to whom sleep is denied. Night-workers seeking refreshment mingled here with women of the streets; an occasional drunken sailor, a thief making a rendezvous with a thief, tramps and wastrels, foregather for a moment within the circle of light before drifting out into the darkness again. There are some who are regular customers, who develop a kind of comradeship, exchanging tales of misfortune; and from these the author weaves a tragic or pitiful or romantic story of human lives. For all the permanent elements of romance are in this underworld, only with the values distorted and modified. Here, also, are sudden vicissitudes of fortune, passionate human affections, love of woman and of child, fear of violence and of death. It is life lived close to the margin, in perpetual familiarity with the reality of common things; darkness and cold, hunger and despair. It is life lived, that is to say, as perhaps the majority of mankind are living it to-day; never so far removed from the possibility of privation and of danger as to be able to settle down tranquil in a universe of security. The common impression, amongst those who do not dwell in such a universe, is that existence under such conditions must reel back into savagery or apathy--into a kind of numbness before all the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or into the fierce fight for existence upon the sinking ship or in the crumbling earthquake city. But experience is quite otherwise. Comradeship, desire, human affection, kindliness, and pity, all here survive amongst men so shabby and twisted as to appear scarcely human, and women with painted faces not pleasant to look upon. Nay more, a certain attitude of cheeriness and enjoyment seems to be bred out of the very extremity of fortune. There is a rich humour in all Mr. Lyons’s sketches, for much of which, indeed, the onlooker and recorder may be responsible, but some of which is native to the original character. Sometimes it assumes the form of verbal exaggeration and