in the East of London.
The poor soon came to understand the man who was as liberal with his
sympathy as he was chary of meat and coal tickets, who only aimed at
being their friend, at listening to their troubles, and aiding them with
counsel, as if he were one of themselves, at putting them in the way of
honest work, at teaching their children, at protecting them with a
perfect courage and chivalry against oppression and wrong. He
instinctively appealed in fact to their higher nature, and such an
appeal seldom remains unanswered. In the roughest costermonger there is
a vein of real nobleness, often even of poetry, in which lies the whole
chance of his rising to a better life. I remember, as an instance of the
way in which such a vein can be touched, the visit of a lady, well known
for her work in the poorer districts of London, to a low alley in this
very parish. She entered the little mission-room with a huge basket,
filled not with groceries or petticoats, but with roses. There was
hardly one pale face among the women bending over their sewing that did
not flush with delight as she distributed her gifts. Soon, as the news
spread down the alley, rougher faces peered in at window and door, and
great "navvies" and dock-labourers put out their hard fists for a
rosebud with the shyness and delight of schoolboys. "She was a _real_
lady," was the unanimous verdict of the alley; like Edward Denison she
had somehow discovered that man does not live by bread alone, and that
the communion of rich and poor is not to be found in appeals to the
material but to the spiritual side of man.

"What do you look on as the greatest boon that has been conferred on the
poorer classes in later years?" said a friend to me one day, after
expatiating on the rival claims of schools, missions, shoe-black
brigades, and a host of other philanthropic efforts for their
assistance. I am afraid I sank in his estimation when I answered,
"Sixpenny photographs." But any one who knows what the worth of family
affection is among the lower classes, and who has seen the array of
little portraits stuck over a labourer's fireplace, still gathering
together into one the "home" that life is always parting--the boy that
has "gone to Canada," the girl "out at service," the little one with the
golden hair that sleeps under the daisies, the old grandfather in the
country--will perhaps feel with me that in counteracting the tendencies,
social and industrial, which ever