ers. A
missionary brought him a pair of paper slippers, worth fourpence (I saw
them), and proceeded to offer up fifty prayers or so for the good of Dan
Cullen's soul. But Dan Cullen was the sort of man that wanted his soul
left alone. He did not care to have Tom, Dick, or Harry, on the strength
of fourpenny slippers, tampering with it. He asked the missionary kindly
to open the window, so that he might toss the slippers out. And the
missionary went away, to return no more, likewise impressed with the
ungratefulness of the poor.

The cobbler, a brave old hero himself, though unaneled and unsung, went
privily to the head office of the big fruit brokers for whom Dan Cullen
had worked as a casual labourer for thirty years. Their system was such
that the work was almost entirely done by casual hands. The cobbler told
them the man's desperate plight, old, broken, dying, without help or
money, reminded them that he had worked for them thirty years, and asked
them to do something for him.

"Oh," said the manager, remembering Dan Cullen without having to refer to
the books, "you see, we make it a rule never to help casuals, and we can
do nothing."

Nor did they do anything, not even sign a letter asking for Dan Cullen's
admission to a hospital. And it is not so easy to get into a hospital in
London Town. At Hampstead, if he passed the doctors, at least four
months would elapse before he could get in, there were so many on the
books ahead of him. The cobbler finally got him into the Whitechapel
Infirmary, where he visited him frequently. Here he found that Dan
Cullen had succumbed to the prevalent feeling, that, being hopeless, they
were hurrying him out of the way. A fair and logical conclusion, one
must agree, for an old and broken man to arrive at, who has been
resolutely "disciplined" and "drilled" for ten years. When they sweated
him for Bright's disease to remove the fat from the kidneys, Dan Cullen
contended that the sweating was hastening his death; while Bright's
disease, being a wasting away of the kidneys, there was therefore no fat
to remove, and the doctor's excuse was a palpable lie. Whereupon the
doctor became wroth, and did not come near him for nine days.

Then his bed was tilted up so that his feet and legs were elevated. At
once dropsy appeared in the body, and Dan Cullen contended that the thing
was done in order to run the water down into his body from his legs and
kill him more quickly. H