In this room, in which a score of well-educated men are writing hard all Sunday long to get a few coppers, the stragglers of a doomed legion are really making the last stand. They may fight desperately, and hold their ground for a time, but they will yield eventually, and the hospital or the workhouse will claim them. Yet some of them have homes they have forfeited, wives and children from whom by their own act they have separated themselves for ever. Among the men I have met in a common lodging-house is one who, every now and then, is interviewed in the common kitchen by his family solicitor. He is a trustee to a marriage settlement, and his signature is occasionally necessary to deeds and transfers. A little while back he had to put his signature to a cheque for £72,000. Why, under these circumstances, is there no home for him--no position open to him in which at least he could earn the rent of a private lodging? That is a mystery the solution of which is known only to himself, his relatives, and the family solicitor. He has a wife and sons and daughters, and they live in a pretty villa and keep servants, entertain, and visit their neighbours. But many a night since the thing happened that made it impossible for him ever again to be seen with his own people he has been too poor even to afford the few pence for a doss-house bed, and has had to seek shelter in one of the night refuges for the utterly destitute or sleep under a railway arch. If we were to stand at the entrance of a lodging-house such as this for a night and watch the guests as they come in--some of them so late that on the outside lamp is the reassuring notice, "A Night Porter kept"--we should see a strange procession of human documents. If we knew the story of each we should have the details of life romances far more dramatic and haunting than those which are the stock-in-trade of fictionists who sit at home at ease and imagine things. Look at this man, for instance, who is limping in and cringing to the deputy. If you are in the kitchen to-morrow morning you will see him do the same to a sturdy fellow who enters jauntily. You will see him take a teapot from the hob, where he has been keeping it hot, and put it on the table before the new arrival. The one man is the valet of the other. For a copper or two a week he cleans the other man's boots and gets his breakfast ready. The man who employs a valet is a professional beggar. He can pitch a good tale, and his features suggest better days, and so he does exceedingly well in certain neighbourhoods. The valet is a mystery. No one knows how he earns his living. Occasionally he leaves the lodging-house for some weeks, saying that he has come into a little money. But he drifts back again, and is generally--if possible--more dilapidated than when he left.