bankment. He made his way through the galleries of the
booksellers and the National Gallery, which had been open continuously
day and night to all decently dressed people now for more than twelve
years, and across the rose-gardens of Trafalgar Square, and so by the
hotel colonnade to the Embankment. He had long known of these admirable
offices, which had swept the last beggars and matchsellers and all the
casual indigent from the London streets, and he believed that he would,
as a matter of course, be able to procure a ticket for food and a
night's lodgings and some indication of possible employment.

But he had not reckoned upon the new labour troubles, and when he got to
the Embankment he found the offices hopelessly congested and besieged by
a large and rather unruly crowd. He hovered for a time on the outskirts
of the waiting multitude, perplexed and dismayed, and then he became
aware of a movement, a purposive trickling away of people, up through
the arches of the great buildings that had arisen when all the railway
stations were removed to the south side of the river, and so to the
covered ways of the Strand. And here, in the open glare of midnight,
he found unemployed men begging, and not only begging, but begging with
astonishing assurance, from the people who were emerging from the small
theatres and other such places of entertainment which abounded in that
thoroughfare.

This was an altogether unexampled thing. There had been no begging in
London streets for a quarter of a century. But that night the police
were evidently unwilling or unable to cope with the destitute who were
invading those well-kept quarters of the town. They had become stonily
blind to anything but manifest disorder.

Barnet walked through the crowd, unable to bring himself to ask; indeed
his bearing must have been more valiant than his circumstances, for
twice he says that he was begged from. Near the Trafalgar Square
gardens, a girl with reddened cheeks and blackened eyebrows, who was
walking alone, spoke to him with a peculiar friendliness.

'I'm starving,' he said to her abruptly.

'Oh! poor dear!' she said; and with the impulsive generosity of her
kind, glanced round and slipped a silver piece into his hand....

It was a gift that, in spite of the precedent of De Quincey, might under
the repressive social legislation of those times, have brought Barnet
within reach of the prison lash. But he took it, he confesses, and
thanked her