isease, the
effluvia and vile exhalations of overcrowded and rotten life, and next
day it is carted about again to be sold.

The poor worker of the East End never knows what it is to eat good,
wholesome meat or fruit--in fact, he rarely eats meat or fruit at all;
while the skilled workman has nothing to boast of in the way of what he
eats. Judging from the coffee-houses, which is a fair criterion, they
never know in all their lives what tea, coffee, or cocoa tastes like. The
slops and water-witcheries of the coffee-houses, varying only in
sloppiness and witchery, never even approximate or suggest what you and I
are accustomed to drink as tea and coffee.

A little incident comes to me, connected with a coffee-house not far from
Jubilee Street on the Mile End Road.

"Cawn yer let me 'ave somethin' for this, daughter? Anythin', Hi don't
mind. Hi 'aven't 'ad a bite the blessed dy, an' Hi'm that fynt . . . "

She was an old woman, clad in decent black rags, and in her hand she held
a penny. The one she had addressed as "daughter" was a careworn woman of
forty, proprietress and waitress of the house.

I waited, possibly as anxiously as the old woman, to see how the appeal
would be received. It was four in the afternoon, and she looked faint
and sick. The woman hesitated an instant, then brought a large plate of
"stewed lamb and young peas." I was eating a plate of it myself, and it
is my judgment that the lamb was mutton and that the peas might have been
younger without being youthful. However, the point is, the dish was sold
at sixpence, and the proprietress gave it for a penny, demonstrating anew
the old truth that the poor are the most charitable.

The old woman, profuse in her gratitude, took a seat on the other side of
the narrow table and ravenously attacked the smoking stew. We ate
steadily and silently, the pair of us, when suddenly, explosively and
most gleefully, she cried out to me,--

"Hi sold a box o' matches! Yus," she confirmed, if anything with greater
and more explosive glee. "Hi sold a box o' matches! That's 'ow Hi got
the penny."

"You must be getting along in years," I suggested.

"Seventy-four yesterday," she replied, and returned with gusto to her
plate.

"Blimey, I'd like to do something for the old girl, that I would, but
this is the first I've 'ad to-dy," the young fellow alongside volunteered
to me. "An' I only 'ave this because I 'appened to make an odd shilling
washin' out