I am bound to suppose that I must have been a tolerably tiring person to have to do with during my first year in London. The reason of this was that I could never concentrate my thoughts upon intimate, personal interests, either my own or those of the people I met. My thoughts were never of persons, but always of the people; never of affairs, but always of tendencies, movements, issues, ultimate ends. Probably my crude unrest would have made me tiresome to any people. It must have been peculiarly irritating to my contemporaries at that period, who, whatever they may have lacked, assuredly possessed in a remarkable degree the faculty of concentration upon their own individual affairs, their personal part in the race for personal gain. I remember that I talked, even to the poor, overworked servant at my lodging, rather of the prospects of her class and order than of anything more intimate or within her narrow scope. Poor Bessie! She was of the callously named tribe of lodging-house "slaveys"; and what gave me some interest in her personality, apart from the type she represented, was the fact that she had come from the Vale of Blackmore, a part of Dorset which I knew very well. I even remembered, for its exceptional picturesqueness and beauty of situation, the cottage in which Bessie had passed her life until one year before my arrival at the fourth-rate Bloomsbury "apartments" house in which she now toiled for a living. There was little enough of the sap of her native valley left in Bessie's cheeks now. She had acquired the London muddiness of complexion quickly, poor child, in the semi-subterranean life she led. I was moved to inquire as to what had led her to come to London, and gathered that she had been anxious to "see a bit o' life." Certainly she saw life, of a kind, when she entered her horrible underground kitchen of a morning, for, as a chance errand once showed me, its floor was a moving carpet of black-beetles until after the gas was lighted. In Bloomsbury, Bessie's daily work began about six o'clock--there were four stories in the house, and coals and food and water required upon every floor--and ended some seventeen hours later. Occasionally, an exacting lodger would make it eighteen hours--the number of Bessie's years in the world--but seventeen was the normal. The trains which every day came rushing in from the country to the various railway termini of London were almost past counting. The "rural exodus," as it was called, was a sadly real movement then. Every one of them brought at least one Bessie, and one of her male counterparts, with ruddy cheeks, a tin box, and bright eyes straining to "see life." Insatiable London drew them all into its maw, and, while sapping the roses from their cheeks, enslaved many of them under one of the greatest curses of that day: the fascination of the streets.