d me sat, or lay, London's homeless--wretched-looking
men in long, tattered overcoats, baggy, buttonless trousers, cracked and
laceless boots, and shapeless bowlers, too weak from want of food and
rest even to think of work, almost incapable, indeed, of thought at
all--breathing corpses, nothing more, with premature signs of
decomposition in their filthy smell. And the women--the women were, if
possible, ranker--feebly pulsating, feebly throbbing, foully stinking,
rotten, living deaths. No amount of soap, food, or warmth could reclaim
them now. Nature's implacable law--the survival of the fittest, the
weakest to the wall--was here exhibited in all its brutal force, and, as
I gazed at the weakest, my heart turned sick within me.

Time advanced; one by one the army of tatterdemalions crawled away, God
alone knew how, God alone knew where. In all probability God did not
care. Why should He? He created Nature and Nature's laws.

A different type of humanity replaced this garbage: neat and dapper
girls on their way to business; black-bowlered, spotless-leathered,
a-guinea-a-week clerks, casting longing glances at the pale grass and
countless trees (their only reminiscence of the country), as they
hastened their pace, lest they should be a minute late for their hateful
servitude; a policeman with the characteristic stride and swinging arms;
a brisk and short-stepped postman; an apoplectic-looking,
second-hand-clothes-man; an emaciated widow; a typical charwoman; two
mechanics; the usual brutal-faced labourer; one of the idle rich in
shiny hat, high collar, cutaway coat, prancing past on a coal-black
horse; and a bevy of nursemaids.

To show my mind was not centred on the occult,--bootlaces, collar-studs,
the two buttons on the back of ladies' coats, dyed hair, servants' feet,
and a dozen and one other subjects, quite other than the superphysical,
successively occupied my thoughts. Imagine, then, my surprise and the
shock I received, when, on glancing at the gravel in front of me, I saw
two shadows--two enigmatical shadows. A dog came shambling along the
path, showed its teeth, snarled, sprang on one side, and, with bristling
hair, fled for its life. I examined the plot of ground behind me; there
was nothing that could in any way account for the shadows, nothing like
them. Something rubbed against my leg. I involuntarily put down my hand;
it was a foot--a clammy lump of ice, but, unmistakably, a foot. Yet of
what? I saw noth