Stepney, with old-fashioned houses which looked happy, harmless homes, I
could only be bidden imagine avenues of iniquity branching off on either
hand. But I actually saw nothing slumlike; indeed, with a current of
cool east wind in our faces, which the motion of the tram reinforced,
the ride was an experience delightful to every sense. It was significant
also of the endlessness of London that as far as the tram-car took us we
seemed as far as ever from the bounds of the city; whatever point we
reached there was still as much or more London beyond.

Perhaps poverty has everywhere become shyer than it used to be in the
days before slumming (now itself of the past) began to exploit it. At
any rate, I thought that in my present London sojourn I found less
unblushing destitution than in the more hopeless or more shameless days
of 1882-3. In those days I remember being taken by a friend, much
concerned for my knowledge of that side of London, to some dreadful
purlieu where I saw and heard and smelled things quite as bad as any
that I did long afterwards in the over-tenanted regions of New York. My
memory is still haunted by the vision of certain hapless creatures who
fled blinking from one hole in the wall to another, with little or
nothing on, and of other creatures much in liquor and loudly scolding
and quarrelling, with squalid bits of childhood scattered about
underfoot, and vague shapes of sickness and mutilation, and all the time
a buying and selling of loathsome second-hand rags.

In the midst of it there stood, like figures of a monument erected to
the local genius of misery and disorder, two burly figures of
half-drunken men, threatening each other with loud curses and shaken
fists under the chin of a policeman, perfectly impassive, with eyes
dropped upon the fists which all but stirred the throat-latch of his
helmet. When the men should strike, I was aware that it would be his