astonishing assurance, from the people who were emerging from the small
theatres and other such places of entertainment which abounded in that
thoroughfare.

This was an altogether unexampled thing. There had been no begging in
London streets for a quarter of a century. But that night the police
were evidently unwilling or unable to cope with the destitute who were
invading those well-kept quarters of the town. They had become stonily
blind to anything but manifest disorder.

Barnet walked through the crowd, unable to bring himself to ask; indeed
his bearing must have been more valiant than his circumstances, for
twice he says that he was begged from. Near the Trafalgar Square
gardens, a girl with reddened cheeks and blackened eyebrows, who was
walking alone, spoke to him with a peculiar friendliness.

'I'm starving,' he said to her abruptly.

'Oh! poor dear!' she said; and with the impulsive generosity of her
kind, glanced round and slipped a silver piece into his hand....

It was a gift that, in spite of the precedent of De Quincey, might under
the repressive social legislation of those times, have brought Barnet
within reach of the prison lash. But he took it, he confesses, and
thanked her as well as he was able, and went off very gladly to get
food.

Section 8

A day or so later--and again his freedom to go as he pleased upon the