Chapter VI

Frying-Pan Alley And A Glimpse Of Inferno

>>>>The beasts they hunger, and eat, and die,
>>>>And so do we, and the world s a sty.
>>>>"Swinehood hath no remedy,
>>>>Say many men, and hasten by.
>>>>-- Sidney Lanier

Three of us walked down Mile End Road, and
one was a hero. He was a slender lad of nine
teen, so slight and frail, in fact, that, like Era
Lippo Lippi, a puff of wind might double him
up and turn him over. He was a burning young
socialist, in the first throes of enthusiasm and
ripe for martyrdom. As platform speaker or
chairman he had taken an active and dangerous
part in the many indoor and outdoor pro-Boer
meetings which have vexed the serenity of Merry
England these several years back. Little items
he had been imparting to me as he walked along;
of being mobbed in parks and on tram-cars; of
climbing on the platform to lead the forlorn
hope, when brother speaker after brother speaker
had been dragged down by the angry crowd and
cruelly beaten; of a siege in a church, where he

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