At the close of one of the meetings a little boy was found sobbing. With some difficulty he was induced to tell his tale. It was simple. His widowed mother, his sisters and he, all lived in one room. Everything had been sold to buy bread except two white mice, the boy's pets. Through all their poverty they had kept those two white mice, but at last they, too, must go! With the proceeds he bought street songs, which he retailed on the "waste," and so obtained the means of getting more bread for his mother and sisters. Now they were completely destitute. The boy was accompanied home. Home! It was a wretched attic, in one of the most dilapidated houses. It was a miserably cold and dismal day. In the broken-down grate the dead embers of yesterday's fire remained. On the table, in a piece of newspaper, a few crumbs. The air was close and the smell insupportable. "My good woman," said Mr. Charrington, "why don't you open the window?" "Oh," she replied, "you would not say that if you had had nothing to eat, and had no fire to warm you." The family was relieved. He was intimately connected with the first beginnings of that famous "feeding of the hungry," which has gone on under Mr. Charrington's auspices for so many years, and is still one of the great living facts of the East End of London. _A-propos_ of this, Keith-Falconer wrote-- "During the hard times of the winter of 1879 (due to the long frost and depression of trade), a work was forced on our Mission which we had never contemplated taking up. The difficulties and dangers of wholesale charity are very great, and our desire has been to avoid them, except in cases of extreme circumstances. But the distress of that winter _was_ extreme, and for many weeks we opened our halls and fed the literally starving multitudes with dry bread and cocoa. The austere distress began in December. Hundreds of men were waiting daily at the Docks in the hope (nearly always a disappointed hope) of a job. Starving men were found in several instances eating muddy orange-peel picked off the road. "Our feeding became a very public matter, as there was much correspondence about it in the _Times_, the _Daily News_, the _Echo_ and other leading papers, and many people came from long distances to see for themselves. The public supported us liberally with funds, and we were enabled to give no less than twenty thousand meals from January 1st to February 14th, besides which we assisted over three hundred families every week in their homes. We look back to the time as one of very great blessing."