, Lord lumme! I don't know 'ow many pots."

"No work at my own tryde for six weeks," he said further, in reply to my
questions; "nothin' but odd jobs a blessed long wy between."

* * * * *

One meets with all sorts of adventures in coffee-house, and I shall not
soon forget a Cockney Amazon in a place near Trafalgar Square, to whom I
tendered a sovereign when paying my score. (By the way, one is supposed
to pay before he begins to eat, and if he be poorly dressed he is
compelled to pay before he eats).

The girl bit the gold piece between her teeth, rang it on the counter,
and then looked me and my rags witheringly up and down.

"Where'd you find it?" she at length demanded.

"Some mug left it on the table when he went out, eh, don't you think?" I
retorted.

"Wot's yer gyme?" she queried, looking me calmly in the eyes.

"I makes 'em," quoth I.

She sniffed superciliously and gave me the change in small silver, and I
had my revenge by biting and ringing every piece of it.

"I'll give you a ha'penny for another lump of sugar in the tea," I said.

"I'll see you in 'ell first," came the retort courteous. Also, she
amplified the retort courteous in divers vivid and unprintable ways.

I never had much talent for repartee, but she knocked silly what little I
had, and I gulped down my tea a beaten man, while she gloated after me
even as I passed out to the street.

While 300,000 people of London live in one-room tenements, and 900,000
are illegally and viciously housed, 38,000 more are registered as living
in common lodging-houses--known in the vernacular as "doss-houses." There
are many kinds of doss-houses, but in one thing they are all alike, from
the filthy little ones to the monster big ones paying five per cent. and
blatantly lauded by smug middle-class men who know but one thing about
them, and that one thing is their uninhabitableness. By this I do not
mean that the roofs leak or the walls are draughty; but what I do mean is
that life in them is degrading and unwholesome.

"The poor man's hotel," they are often called, but the phrase is
caricature. Not to possess a room to one's self, in which sometimes to
sit alone; to be forced out of bed willy-nilly, the first thing in the
morning; to engage and pay anew for a bed each night; and never to have
any privacy, surely is a mode of existence quite different from that of
hotel life.

This must not be considered a sweeping condemnation of the big private