ever so low; and the desperate tenacity with which the poor will cling
to the last wretched semblance of one is very touching. There are vile
dens, fever-haunted and stenchful crowded courts, where the return of
summer is dreaded because it means the unloosing of myriads of vermin
which render night unbearable, which, nevertheless, are regarded at
this moment as havens of rest by their hard-working occupants.
They can scarcely be said to be furnished. A chair, a mattress, and a
few miserable sticks constitute all the furniture of the single room in
which they have to sleep, and breed, and die; but they cling to it as a
drowning man to a half-submerged raft. Every week they contrive by
pinching and scheming to raise the rent, for with them it is pay or go
and they struggle to meet the collector as the sailor nerves himself to
avoid being sucked under by the foaming wave. If at any time work
fails or sickness comes they are liable to drop helplessly into the
ranks of the homeless. It is bad for a single man to have to confront
the struggle for life in the streets and Casual Wards. But how much
more terrible must it be for the married man with his wife and children
to be turned out into the streets. So long as the family has a lair
into which it can creep at night, he keeps his footing; but when he
loses that solitary foothold then arrives the time if there be such a
thing as Christian compassion, for the helping hand to be held out to
save him from the vortex that sucks him downward--ay, downward to the
hopeless under-strata of crime and despair.

"The heart knoweth its own bitterness and the stranger inter-meddleth
not therewith." But now and then out of the depths there sounds a
bitter wail as of some strong swimmer in his agony as he is drawn under
by the current. A short time ago a respectable man, a chemist in
Holloway, fifty years of age, driven hard to the wall, tried to end it
all by cutting his throat. His wife also cut her throat, and at the