presently be awake....'

Section 7

And then the story tells, with an engaging simplicity, of his descent
from this ecstatic vision of reality.

'Presently I found myself again, and I was beginning to feel cold and a
little hungry.'

He bethought himself of the John Burns Relief Offices which stood upon
the Thames Embankment. He made his way through the galleries of the
booksellers and the National Gallery, which had been open continuously
day and night to all decently dressed people now for more than twelve
years, and across the rose-gardens of Trafalgar Square, and so by the
hotel colonnade to the Embankment. He had long known of these admirable
offices, which had swept the last beggars and matchsellers and all the
casual indigent from the London streets, and he believed that he would,
as a matter of course, be able to procure a ticket for food and a
night's lodgings and some indication of possible employment.

But he had not reckoned upon the new labour troubles, and when he got to
the Embankment he found the offices hopelessly congested and besieged by
a large and rather unruly crowd. He hovered for a time on the outskirts
of the waiting multitude, perplexed and dismayed, and then he became
aware of a movement, a purposive trickling away of people, up through
the arches of the great buildings that had arisen when all the railway
stations were removed to the south side of the river, and so to the
covered ways of the Strand. And here, in the open glare of midnight,
he found unemployed men begging, and not only begging, but begging with