In the murky light
of little rooms filled with thick air child-life has struggled into
existence; up and down their narrow stairs patient endurance and passive
hopelessness ever pass and repass.

Small wonder that the filthy waters of a neighbouring canal woo and
receive so many broken hearts and emaciated bodies.

But the procession now changes its sex, for weary widowed women are
returning to children who for many hours have been lacking a mother's
care, for mothers in the underworld must work if children must eat.

So the weary widows have been at the wash-tubs all day long, and are
coming home with two shillings hardly earned. They call in at the dirty
general shop, where margarine, cheese, bread, tinned meat and firewood
are closely commingled in the dank air.

A loaf, a pennyworth of margarine, a pennyworth of tea, a bundle of
firewood, half a pound of sugar, a pint of lamp-oil exhaust their list
of purchases, for the major part of their earnings is required for the
rent.

So they climb their stairs, they feed the children, put them unwashed to
bed, do some necessary household work, and then settle down themselves
in some shape, without change of attire, that they may rest and be ready
for the duties of the ensuing day. Perhaps sweet oblivion will come even
to them. "Blessings on the man who invented sleep," cried Sancho Panza,
and there is a world of truth in his ecstatic exclamation, "it wraps him
round like a garment."

Aye, that it does, for what would the poor weary women and men of
London's underworld do without it? What would the sick and suffering be
without it? In tiny rooms where darkness is made visible by penny-worths
of oil burned in cheap and nasty lamps, there is no lack of pain and
suffering, and no lack of patient endurance and passive heroism.

As night closes in and semi-darkness reigns around, when the streets are
comparatively silent, when children's voices are no longer heard, come
with me and explore!

It is one o'clock a.m., and we go down six steps into what is
facetiously termed a "breakfast parlour"; here we find a man and woman
about sixty years of age. The woman is seated at a small table on which
stands a small, evil-smelling lamp, and the man is seated at another
small table, but gets no assistance from the lamp; he works in
comparative gloom, for he is almost blind; he works by touch.

For fifty years they have been makers of artificial flowers; both are
clever artists,