comments in which all working-class London is so ready, the most reputable product of the industrial metropolis. Sometimes it finds satisfaction in the jollity excited by drink, as in the experience of the drunken sailor who uplifts his voice in bloodthirsty ballads. Sometimes it has the peculiar reckless insolence of the defiance, out of extremity, of all time’s revenges; the reckless insolence of the “seven men out of hell” in the story of the “Bolivar” who have “euchred God’s almighty storm” and “bluffed the eternal sea.” There is here, however, none of the idealisation, the roseate visions of sordid and ugly things suddenly seen through a mist of make-believe, which fills with an intolerable sentimentality the works of many popular writers of fiction. “Arthur’s” clients, having plumbed the bedrock of life, are suffering no illusions concerning it. They are emphatically convinced that dust is dust and mud is mud, and that a spade may justly be called a spade. Outside the coffee-stall itself, in the small hours of the morning, there is continual necessity for the suppression of rowdies and marauders and those who exhibit anarchic tendencies in a civilisation remote from our own, but with very definite standards. In that civilisation kindliness and good fellowship stand at the summit of the hierarchy of virtues, and a large tolerance replaces the negative prohibitions of the accepted commandments. And in all that company of children, bewildered and confused in a world which they have never learned to understand, the acceptance of a certain level of honour and of order is more clearly recognised than amongst those who, reaching towards the enforcement of austerer limitations, are, perhaps, less successful in attainment. “Sometimes,” says Mr. Lyons, “a sailorman in the throes of a fever may form our circle. Arthur will then arise in his might, peer over his spectacles, and lifting a withered forefinger say, ‘George, I’m surprised at you. Be’ave yeself.’ And George, if he be not very drunk, will subside instantly, saying, ‘Righto, Guv’nor,’ or he will ask respectfully for another cup of coffee and a thick ’un, at the same time challenging the company to deny that Arthur is a gentleman, or he himself a Briton.”