become a Red
Cross nurse or go into a nunnery. In either case they must forego home
and children and all that makes life worth living and old age other than
a nightmare.

CHAPTER XXII--SUICIDE

With life so precarious, and opportunity for the happiness of life so
remote, it is inevitable that life shall be cheap and suicide common. So
common is it, that one cannot pick up a daily paper without running
across it; while an attempt-at-suicide case in a police court excites no
more interest than an ordinary "drunk," and is handled with the same
rapidity and unconcern.

I remember such a case in the Thames Police Court. I pride myself that I
have good eyes and ears, and a fair working knowledge of men and things;
but I confess, as I stood in that court-room, that I was half bewildered
by the amazing despatch with which drunks, disorderlies, vagrants,
brawlers, wife-beaters, thieves, fences, gamblers, and women of the
street went through the machine of justice. The dock stood in the centre
of the court (where the light is best), and into it and out again stepped
men, women, and children, in a stream as steady as the stream of
sentences which fell from the magistrate's lips.

I was still pondering over a consumptive "fence" who had pleaded
inability to work and necessity for supporting wife and children, and who
had received a year at hard labour, when a young boy of about twenty
appeared in the dock. "Alfred Freeman," I caught his name, but failed to
catch the charge. A stout and motherly-looking woman bobbed up in the
witness-box and began her testimony. Wife of the Britannia lock-keeper,
I learned she was. Time, night; a splash; she ran to the lock and found
the prisoner in the water.

I flashed my gaze from her to him. So that was the charge, self-murder.
He stood there dazed and unheeding, his bonny brown hair rumpled down his
forehead, his face haggard and careworn and boyish still.

"Yes, sir," the lock-keeper's wife was saying. "As fast as I pulled to
get 'im out, 'e crawled back. Then I called for 'elp, and some workmen
'appened along, and we got 'im out and turned 'im over to the constable."

The magistrate complimented the woman on her muscular powers, and the
court-room laughed; but all I could see was a boy on the threshold of
life, passionately crawling to muddy death, and there was no laughter in
it.

A man was now in the witness-box, testifying to the boy's good character
and giving