you may not rest so well as usual. But for old
men of sixty, seventy, and eighty, ill-fed, with
neither meat nor blood, to greet the dawn unre-
freshed, and to stagger through the day in mad
search for crusts, with relentless night rushing down
upon them again, and to do this five nights and
days O dear, soft people, full of meat and blood,
how can you ever understand ?

I walked up Mile End Road between the Carter
and the Carpenter. Mile End Road is a wide thor
oughfare, cutting the heart of East London, and
there were tens of thousands of people abroad on
it. I tell you this so that you may fully appreciate
what I shall describe in the next paragraph. As I
say, we walked along, and when they grew bitter
and cursed the land, I cursed with them, cursed as
an American waif would curse, stranded in a strange
and terrible land. And, as I tried to lead them to
believe, and succeeded in making them believe, they
took me for a seafaring man, who had spent his
money in riotous living, lost his clothes (no unusual
occurrence with seafaring men ashore), and was
temporarily broke while looking for a ship. This
accounted for my ignorance of English ways in
general and casual wards in particular, and my
curiosity concerning the same.

The Carter was hard put to keep the pace at
which we walked (he told me that he had eaten

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