in particular cared.'

He was turned out of his lodging in a backward part of London.

'It was with difficulty I persuaded my landlady--she was a needy widow,
poor soul, and I was already in her debt--to keep an old box for me in
which I had locked a few letters, keepsakes, and the like. She lived in
great fear of the Public Health and Morality Inspectors, because she
was sometimes too poor to pay the customary tip to them, but at last she
consented to put it in a dark tiled place under the stairs, and then
I went forth into the world--to seek first the luck of a meal and then
shelter.'

He wandered down into the thronging gayer parts of London, in which a
year or so ago he had been numbered among the spenders.

London, under the Visible Smoke Law, by which any production of visible
smoke with or without excuse was punishable by a fine, had already
ceased to be the sombre smoke-darkened city of the Victorian time; it
had been, and indeed was, constantly being rebuilt, and its main
streets were already beginning to take on those characteristics that
distinguished them throughout the latter half of the twentieth century.
The insanitary horse and the plebeian bicycle had been banished from the
roadway, which was now of a resilient, glass-like surface, spotlessly
clean; and the foot passenger was restricted to a narrow vestige of the
ancient footpath on either side of the track and forbidden at the risk
of a fine, if he survived, to cross the roadway. People descended from
their automobiles upon this pavement and went through the lower shops to
the lifts and stairs to the new ways for pedestrians, the Rows, that
ran along the front of the houses at the level of the first story,