h the first breath of winter there passes a voice half-menacing,
half-mournful, through all the barren ways and phantom-haunted refuges
of the nether world. Too quickly has vanished the brief season when the
sky is clement, when a little food suffices, and the chances of earning
that little are more numerous than at other times; this wind that gives
utterance to its familiar warning is the vaunt-courier of cold and
hunger and solicitude that knows not sleep. Will the winter be a hard
one? It is the question that concerns this world before all others,
that occupies alike the patient workfolk who have yet their home
unbroken, the strugglers foredoomed to loss of such scant needments as
the summer gifted them withal, the hopeless and the self-abandoned and
the lurking creatures of prey. To all of them the first chill breath
from a lowering sky has its voice of admonition; they set their faces;
they sigh, or whisper a prayer, or fling out a curse, each according to
his nature.

And as though the strife here were not already hard enough, behold from
many corners of the land come needy emigrants, prospectless among their
own people, fearing the dark season which has so often meant for them
the end of wages and of food, tempted hither by thought that in the
shadow of palaces work and charity are both more plentiful. Vagabonds,
too, no longer able to lie about the country roads, creep back to their
remembered lairs and join the combat for crusts flung forth by casual
hands. Day after day the stress becomes more grim. One would think that
hosts of the weaker combatants might surely find it seasonable to let
themselves be trodden out of existence, and so make room for those of
more useful sinew; somehow they cling to life; so few in comparison
yield utterly. The thoughtful in the world above look about them with
contentment when carriage-ways are deep with new-fallen snow. 'Good;
here is work for the unemployed.' Ah, if the winter did but last a few
months longer, if the wonted bounds of endurance were but, by some
freak of nature, sensibly overpassed, the carriage-ways would find
another kind of sweeping! . . .

This winter was the last that Shooter's Gardens were destined to know.
The leases had all but run out; the middlemen were garnering their
latest profits; in the spring there would come a wholesale demolition,
and model-lodgings would thereafter occupy the site. Meanwhile the
Gardens looked their surliest; the walls stoo