ill another landing place
offers security. But even here they find that escape is hopeless, for
yet another policeman awaits them.

Those who cannot swim seize their bundles, and, without waiting to
dress, run naked and unashamed along the canal, side, to the merriment
of the bargees, and the joy of the women and girls who happen to have no
son or brother amongst them, for the underworld is not so easily shocked
as the law and its administrators imagine.

Ultimately they, too, find a policeman waiting for them, and a "good
bag" results. But the magistrate is very lenient; with a twinkle in his
eye he reproves them, and fines them one shilling each, which with great
difficulty their "muvvers" pay.

But it has been a good day for the police, for four of them have helped
to convey six shillings from the wretchedly poor to the coffers of the
police-court receiver. But when the school holidays come round, that is
the time for the dirty canal to tell its tale, and to give up its dead,
too!

Read this from the Daily Press, July 16th, 1911--

"A remarkable record in life-saving was disclosed at a Bethnal Green
inquest to-day on a child of six, named Browning, who was drowned in the
Regent's Canal on Bank Holiday.

"Henry H. Terry, an out-of-work carman, said he was called from his
home near by, and raced down to the canal. There was a youth on the bank
holding a stick over the water, apparently waiting for the child to come
up to the surface.

"The coroner: 'How old was the youth?' 'Well, he stood five feet six
inches, and might have gone in without getting out of his depth. I heard
a woman cry, "Why don't you go in!" I dived in five or six times, but
did not bring up the body.' The witness added that he and his brother
had saved many lives at this spot, the latter having effected as many
as twenty-five rescues in a year. Alfred Terry, a silk weaver, described
the point at which the child was drowned as a veritable death-trap, and
mentioned that he had been instrumental during the past twelve years in
saving considerably over one hundred lives at that spot.

"'One hot July afternoon in 1900,' he added,'my mother and I had five of
them in the kitchen at one time with a roaring fire to bring them round.
That was during the school holidays; they dropped in like flies.'

"Accidental death was the verdict."

But when the little ones play in the gutter, danger lurks very near, as
witness the extract of the same date--