shelters them from the street--a poetic fragment from the days of Wren
and Dryden, sore threatened now by an ever-advancing London, hungry for
ground and space. Here was a vast mission-hall, there a still vaster
brewery; on the right, the quiet entrance to the oldworld quiet of
Stepney-Green; and to the left a huge flame-ringed gin-palace, with shops
on either side, hung to the roof with carpets, or brooms, or umbrellas,
plastered with advertisements, and blazing with gas. While in the street
between streamed the ever-moving crowd of East London folk, jostling,
chattering, loafing, doing their business or their pleasure, and made
perpetually interesting, partly by their frank preoccupation with the
simplest realities of life: with eating, drinking, earning, marrying,
child-rearing; still more, perhaps, by the constant presence among them
of that "leisured class" which, alike at the bottom and the top of
things, has time to be gay, curious, and witty.

As he rolled along, watching the scene, Tressady thought to himself, as
he had often thought before, that the East End, in many of its aspects,
is a very decentish sort of place, about which many people talk much
nonsense. He made the remark, carelessly, to Watton.

Watton shrugged his shoulders, and pointed silently to the entrances,
right and left, of two side-streets, the typical streets of the East End:
long lines of low houses,--two storeys always, or two storeys and a
basement,--all of the same yellowish brick, all begrimed by the same
smoke, every door-knocker of the same pattern, every window-blind hung in
the same way, and the same corner "public" on either side, flaming in the
hazy distance.

Watton hardly put his comment into words; but Tressady, who knew him
well, understood, and nodded over his cigarette. Watton meant, of course,