old, he had at least one
wife, upon whom he sponged, and children. (His kind invariably beget
children, many children.) This man was in middle life, and his mother,
a frail creature, was old. She had some small store of money; enough,
I was told, for the few more months she was likely to live, and to
save her from a pauper funeral. She had some lingering internal
complaint. When the man had finished drinking his mother's little
hoard away, he drove her out of doors--not merely with shameful words,
but with blows--to get work, and earn liquor for him. Incredible as it
seems she did get work, and he did take her earnings, and drink them,
for a number of weeks. Then came the morning when she could not leave
her bed. That week the rest of her furniture was sold, and the son
drank it. On Saturday night he threw his mother from her bed to the
floor, removed the bed and bedding, and drank them. She was dead when
he returned, and on Sunday morning he took from his murdered mother's
body the wedding ring which she, miraculously, had preserved to the
end, and drank that. No one slew him. There was no lethal chamber for
him. He did not even figure in a police court for this particular
murder.

People think _L'Assommoir_ dreadful, horrible. I cannot imagine what
stayed Zola's hand; I am at a loss to account for his astonishing
reticence, if he really knew anything of the worst degradation for
which drink is accountable. In two short years I must have come upon a
score of instances in every respect as horrible as that I have
mentioned. And some that were worse; yes, more vile; too vile to
recall even in thought. Brothers and sisters, fathers and daughters,
mothers and sons-- Oh! shame and degradation unspeakable! I do not know
if any section of the community is to blame. I do know that the glory
and brightness of life, the romance and the splendour of life--beauty,
chivalry, loyalty, pomp, grandeur, nobility--all have been for ever
robbed of some of their refulgence for me, as the result of two years
in the under world of London. Life could never be quite the same
again.

I stood at the base of a statue and watched the stately passage among
her cheering subjects of the most venerable lady in Christendom. My
very soul thrilled loyalty to Queen Victoria, loyalty that was proud
and glad. And on the instant it was stabbed by the thought of another
widowed mother, flung from the death-bed her worn fingers had toiled
to save, and flung