a chop alleged by an irritated customer to be raw or done to a
cinder. Poor wretch! he had one trouble, however, which he could not
accept with such equanimity, or rather with such indifference. His
wife was a drunkard. This was an awful trial to him. The worst
consequence was that his boy knew that his mother got drunk. The
neighbours kindly enough volunteered to look after the little man
when he was not at school, and they waylaid him and gave him dinner
when his mother was intoxicated; but frequently he was the first when
he returned to find out that there was nothing for him to eat, and
many a time he got up at night as late as twelve o'clock, crawled
downstairs, and went off to his father to tell him that "she was very
bad, and he could not go to sleep." The father, then, had to keep
his son in the Strand till it was time to close, take him back, and
manage in the best way he could. Over and over again was he obliged
to sit by this wretched woman's bedside till breakfast time, and then
had to go to work as usual. Let anybody who has seen a case of this
kind say whether the State ought not to provide for the relief of
such men as John, and whether he ought not to have been able to send
his wife away to some institution where she might have been tended
and restrained from destroying, not merely herself, but her husband
and her child. John hardly bore up under this sorrow. A man may
endure much, provided he knows that he will be well supported when
his day's toil is over; but if the help for which he looks fails, he
falls. Oh those weary days in that dark back dining-room, from which
not a square inch of sky was visible! weary days haunted by a fear
that while he was there unknown mischief was being done! weary days,
whose close nevertheless he dreaded! Beaten down, baffled,
disappointed, if we are in tolerable health we can contrive to live
on some almost impossible chance, some most distant flicker of hope.
It is astonishing how minute a crack in the heavy uniform cloud will