great pile of a new factory of artistic pottery, a rival on the north
side of the river to Doulton's immense works on the south. The old
winding streets near it, and the blocks of workmen's dwellings recently
erected under its shadow, were largely occupied by the workers in its
innumerable floors, and among these workers was a large proportion of
skilled artisans, men often of a considerable amount of cultivation,
earning high wages, and maintaining a high standard of comfort. A great
many of them, trained in the art school which Murray Edwardes had been
largely instrumental in establishing within easy distance of their
houses, were men of genuine artistic gifts and accomplishment, and as
the development of one faculty tends on the whole to set others working,
when Robert, after a few weeks' work in the place, set up a popular
historical lecture once a fortnight, announcing the fact by a blue and
white poster in the schoolroom windows, it was the potters who provided
him with his first hearers.

The rest of the parish was divided between a population of dock
labourers, settled there to supply the needs of the great dock which ran
up into the south-eastern corner of it, two or three huge breweries, and
a colony of watchmakers, an offshoot of Clerkenwell, who lived together
in two or three streets, and showed the same peculiarities of race and
specialised training to be noticed in the more northerly settlement from
which they had been thrown off like a swarm from a hive. Outside these
well-defined trades there was, of course, a warehouse population, and a
mass of heterogeneous cadging and catering which went on chiefly in the
riverside streets at the other side of the parish from Elgood Street, in
the neighbourhood of St. Wilfrid's.

St. Wilfrid's at this moment seemed to Robert to be doing a very
successful work among the lowest strata of the parish. From them at one
end of the scale, and from the innumerable clerks and superintendents
who during the daytime crowded the vast warehouses of which the district
was full, its Lenten congregations, now in full activity, were chiefly
drawn.

The Protestant opposition, which had shown itself so brutally and
persistently in old days, was now, so far as outward manifestations
went, all but extinct. The cassocked monk-like clergy might preach and
'process' in the open air as much as they pleased. The populace, where
it was not indifferent, was friendly, and devoted living had b