A committee of our Board has held three special sessions for the purpose of interviewing these old people, and the answer has come with wearying monotony, "No, thank you, five shillings would be no good to me. I have nowhere to go." Some have sons and daughters, but "heavy families" and crowded rooms dry up filial piety. There is no place for the aged father or mother in our rack-rented city, and the old people accept their fate with the quiet philosophy of the poor. The long string of human wreckage files past us, some bowed and bent with the weight of years, others upright and active, some with the hoary heads of the traditional prophets, others black-haired and keen-eyed still, for the "high living" of the workhouse, as is often remarked, preserves youth in a miraculous way. Some are crippled and half-blind, others suffer with deafness--an ailment of poverty, which very naturally grows worse under inquisitive questioning--and nearly all have rheumatism. A curate once told me that he was summoned to a sick parishioner who was "troubled in mind," and wanted to make his peace with Heaven, but the only sin he could remember was "the rheumatics." The disease seems to be a national sin. One hears the country accents of the United Kingdom--the burr of Northumbria, the correct English of East Anglia, the rough homeliness of Yorkshire and the Midlands, the soft accents of Devonshire and the West, the precision of the foreign English of the Welsh mountains, the pleasant ring of the Scottish tongue, the brogue of old Ireland. Few seem Londoners. Take any group of people, and see how few of her children London seems to bring to maturity. It is our last meeting to-day, and we go to visit those who cannot attend, the sick and bed-ridden in the infirmary--a mere form, for these are vessels which will sail no more, sea-battered, half-derelict, nearing port, and for them the dawn will break in the New Jerusalem. Some are palsied and paralysed and half-senile, but now and again keen old eyes look at us from the whiteness of the ratepayers' sheets and regret they are "too old to apply." Very ancient folk live in these wards, and their birthdays go back to the tens and twenties of last century, one old lady being born in the historic year of 1815. An old man, jealous of her greater glory, says he is 109, but our register of age gives the comparatively recent date of 1830. Few of them seem to have any friends or visitors. Children are dead, grandchildren and great-grandchildren have forgotten them; but they do not complain, age mercifully deadens the faculties, though their terrible loneliness was once graphically written on my brain by the speech of an old Irishwoman: "I am quite alone, lady; I have no friends but you and the Almighty God."