I did not object to his cheerfulness, though for misery to be cheerful
seemed to be rather trivial, and I was better pleased with the
impassioned bearing of a pair who passed me another day as I sat on one
of the benches beside the path where the trees were dropping their
listless leaves. The pair were a father and mother, if I might judge
from their having each a babe in their arms and two or three other babes
at their heels. They were not actually in tatters, but anything more
intensely threadbare than their thin clothes could not be imagined; they
were worse than ragged. They looked neither to the right nor to the
left, but stared straight on and pressed straight on rather rapidly,
with such desperate tragedy in their looks as moved me to that noble
terror which the old-fashioned critics used to inculcate as the best
effect of tragedy on the stage. I followed them a little way before I
gained courage to speak to the man, who seemed to have been sick, and
looked more miserable, if there was a choice, than the woman. Then I
asked him, superfluously enough (it might have seemed in a ghastly
pleasantry, to him) if he was down on his luck. He owned that he was,
and in guarantee of his good faith took the shilling I offered him. If
his need had apparently been less dire I might have made it a sovereign;
but one must not fly in the face of the Providence, which is probably
not ill-advised in choosing certain of us to be reduced to absolute
destitution. The man smiled a sick, thin-lipped smile which showed his
teeth in a sort of pinched way, but did not speak more; his wife,
gloomily unmoved, passed me without a look, and I rather slunk back to
my seat, feeling that I had represented, if I had not embodied, society
to her.

I contribute this instance of poverty as the extremest that came to my
knowledge in London; but I do not insist that it was genuine, and if any
more scientific student of civilization wishes to insinuate that my