as the park opened.

These are fairly typical cases of the men who are now wandering
homeless through the streets. That is the way in which the nomads of
civilization are constantly being recruited from above.

Such are the stories gathered at random one Midsummer night this year
under the shade of the plane trees of the Embankment. A month later,
when one of my staff took the census of the sleepers out of doors along
the line of the Thames from Blackfriars to Westminster, he found three
hundred and sixty-eight persons sleeping in the open air. Of these,
two hundred and seventy were on the Embankment proper, and ninety-eight
in and about Covent Garden Market, while the recesses of Waterloo and
Blackfriars Bridges were full of human misery.

This, be it remembered, was not during a season of bad trade.
The revival of business has been attested on all hands, notably by the
barometer of strong drink. England is prosperous enough to drink rum
in quantities which appall the Chancellor of the Exchequer but she is
not prosperous enough to provide other shelter than the midnight sky
for these poor outcasts on the Embankment.

To very many even of those who live in London it may be news that there
are so many hundreds who sleep out of doors every night. There are
comparatively few people stirring after midnight, and when we are
snugly tucked into our own beds we are apt to forget the multitude
outside in the rain and the storm who are shivering the long hours
through on the hard stone seats in the open or under the arches of the
railway. These homeless, hungry people are, however there, but being
broken-spirited folk for the most part they seldom make their voices