‘Have you nothing by you to eat but the piece of bread I see there?’

‘Nothing. And we had the rest of the loaf for our breakfast, with water. I don’t know what’s to come of it.’

‘Have you no prospect of improvement?’

‘If my eldest son earns anything to-day, he’ll bring it home. Then we shall have something to eat to-night, and may be able to do something towards the rent. If not, I don’t know what’s to come of it.’

‘This is a sad state of things.’

‘Yes, sir; it’s a hard, hard life. Take care of the stairs as you go, sir – they’re broken, – and good day, sir!’

These people had a mortal dread of entering the workhouse, and received no out-of-door relief.

In another room, in still another tenement, I found a very decent woman with five children, – the last a baby, and she herself a patient of the parish doctor, – to whom, her husband being in the hospital, the Union allowed for the support of herself and family, four shillings a week and five loaves. I suppose when Thisman, M.P., and Thatman, M.P., and the Public-blessing Party, lay their heads together in course of time, and come to an equalisation of rating, she may go down to the dance of death to the tune of sixpence more.

I could enter no other houses for that one while, for I could not bear the contemplation of the children. Such heart as I had summoned to sustain me against the miseries of the adults failed me when I looked at the children. I saw how young they were, how hungry, how serious and still. I thought of them, sick and dying in those lairs. I think of them dead without anguish; but to think of them so suffering and so dying quite unmanned me.

Down by the river’s bank in Ratcliff, I was turning upward by a side street, therefore, to regain the railway, when my eyes rested on the inscription across the road, ‘East London Children’s Hospital.’ I could scarcely have seen an inscription better suited to my frame of mind; and I went across and went straight in.