extenuating evidence. He was the boy's foreman, or had been.
Alfred was a good boy, but he had had lots of trouble at home, money
matters. And then his mother was sick. He was given to worrying, and he
worried over it till he laid himself out and wasn't fit for work. He
(the foreman), for the sake of his own reputation, the boy's work being
bad, had been forced to ask him to resign.

"Anything to say?" the magistrate demanded abruptly.

The boy in the dock mumbled something indistinctly. He was still dazed.

"What does he say, constable?" the magistrate asked impatiently.

The stalwart man in blue bent his ear to the prisoner's lips, and then
replied loudly, "He says he's very sorry, your Worship."

"Remanded," said his Worship; and the next case was under way, the first
witness already engaged in taking the oath. The boy, dazed and
unheeding, passed out with the jailer. That was all, five minutes from
start to finish; and two hulking brutes in the dock were trying
strenuously to shift the responsibility of the possession of a stolen
fishing-pole, worth probably ten cents.

The chief trouble with these poor folk is that they do not know how to
commit suicide, and usually have to make two or three attempts before
they succeed. This, very naturally, is a horrid nuisance to the
constables and magistrates, and gives them no end of trouble. Sometimes,
however, the magistrates are frankly outspoken about the matter, and
censure the prisoners for the slackness of their attempts. For instance
Mr. R. S---, chairman of the S--- B--- magistrates, in the case the other
day of Ann Wood, who tried to make away with herself in the canal: "If
you wanted to do it, why didn't you do it and get it done with?" demanded
the indignant Mr. R. S---. "Why did you not get under the water and make
an end of it, instead of giving us all this trouble and bother?"

Poverty, misery, and fear of the workhouse, are the principal causes of
suicide among the working classes. "I'll drown myself before I go into
the workhouse," said Ellen Hughes Hunt, aged fifty-two. Last Wednesday
they held an inquest on her body at Shoreditch. Her husband came from
the Islington Workhouse to testify. He had been a cheesemonger, but
failure in business and poverty had driven him into the workhouse,
whither his wife had refused to accompany him.

She was last seen at one in the morning. Three hours later her hat and
jacket were found on the towing p