anxious,
to say that in a great measure Jane Cakebread was the making of Thomas
Holmes.

Years have passed since we laid Jane gently to rest, but she comes back
to me and dominates me whenever I mentally call my old friends together.
Her voice is the loudest, her speech the most voluble, and her manner
the most assertive of all my motley friends. They are all gathering
around me as I write. My friend who teaches music by colour is here,
my friend with his secret invention that will dispense with steam and
electricity is here too; "Little Ebbs" the would-be policeman is here
too; the prima donna whose life was more than a tragedy, the architect
with his wonderful but never accepted designs, the broken artist with
his pictures, the educated but non-sober lady who could convert plaster
models into marble statuary are all with me. The unspeakably degraded
parson smoking cigarettes, his absence of shirt hidden by a rusty
cassock, lolls in my easy-chair; my burglar friend who had "done" forty
years and was still asking for more, they are all around me! And my
dipsomaniac friends have come too! I hear them talking and arguing, when
a strident voice calls out, "No arguing! no arguing! argument spoils
everything!" and Jane stops the talk of others by occupying the platform
herself and recites a chapter from the book of Job. I am living it all
over again!

And now troop in my suffering friends. Here is the paralysed woman of
thirty-five who has for twenty years lain in bed the whiles her sister
has worked incessantly to maintain her! Here is my widow friend who
after working fifteen hours daily for years was dragged from the Lea. As
she sits and listens her hands are making matchboxes and throwing them
over her shoulder, one, two, three, four! right, left! they go to the
imaginary heaps upon the imaginary beds. While blighted children are
crawling upon the floor looking up at me with big eyes. Here is my
patient old friend who makes "white flowers" although she is eighty
years of age, and still keeps at it, though, thank God, she gets the
old-age pension.

Now come in the young men and maidens, the blighted blossoms of humanity
who wither and die before the time of fruition, for that fell disease
consumption has laid its deadly hand upon them.

Oh! the mystery of it all, the sorrow and madness of it all! I open my
door and they file out. Some back to the unseen world, some back to the
lower depths of this world! Surely they