In the course of our journey we passed through a small strip of Chelsea. I remember that among the other places we passed he pointed out the home of Thomas Carlyle. I found that he was just as familiar with names and deeds of all the great literary persons who had lived in that quarter of London as he was with the political history. When he afterward told me that he had had very little education in school, because he had been compelled to go to work when he was ten years of age, I asked him how he had since found time, in the course of his busy life, to gain the wide knowledge of history and literature which he evidently possessed. "You see," he replied, with a quiet smile, "I earned my living for a time as a candle maker and I have burned a good many candles at night ever since." Mr. Burns had promised to show me, within the space of a few hours, examples of the sort of work which is now going on in every part of London. A few years ago, on the site of an ancient prison, the London County Council erected several blocks of workingmen's tenements. These were, I believe, the first, or nearly the first, of the tenements erected by the city in the work of clearing away unsanitary areas and providing decent homes for the working classes. It was to these buildings, in which a population of about 4,000 persons live, that we went first. The buildings are handsome brick structures, well lighted, with wide, open, brick-paved courts between the rows of houses, so that each block looked like a gigantic letter H with the horizontal connecting line left out. Of course, these buildings were, as some one said, little more than barracks compared with the houses that are now being erected for labouring people in some of the London suburbs, but they are clean and wholesome and, to any one familiar with the narrow, grimy streets in the East End of London, it was hard to believe that they stood in the midst of a region which a few years ago had been a typical London slum. A little farther on we crossed the river and entered what Mr. Burns referred to as "my own district," Battersea, where he was born and where he has lived and worked all his life, except for one year spent as an engineer in Nigeria, Africa.