The People of the Abyss

Excerpt: ...They cut their provender in the field, and they glean the vintage of the wicked. They lie all night naked without clothing, and have no covering in the cold. They are wet with the showers of the mountains, and embrace the rock for want of a shelter. There are that pluck the fatherless from the breast, and take a pledge of the poor. So that they go about naked without clothing, and being an hungered they carry the sheaves.-Job xxiv. 2-10. Seven and twenty centuries agone! And it is all as true and apposite to-day in the innermost centre of this Christian civilisation whereof Edward VII. is king. CHAPTER XIII-DAN CULLEN, DOCKER I stood, yesterday, in a room in one of the "Municipal Dwellings," not far from Leman Street. If I looked into a dreary future and saw that I would have to live in such a room until I died, I should immediately go down, plump into the Thames, and cut the tenancy short. It was not a room. Courtesy to the language will no more permit it to be called a room than it will permit a hovel to be called a mansion. It was a den, a lair. Seven feet by eight were its dimensions, and the ceiling was so low as not to give the cubic air space required by a British soldier in barracks. A crazy couch, with ragged coverlets, occupied nearly half the room. A rickety table, a chair, and a couple of boxes left little space in which to turn around. Five dollars would have purchased everything in sight. The floor was bare, while the walls and ceiling were literally covered with blood marks and splotches. Each mark represented a violent death-of an insect, for the place swarmed with vermin, a plague with which no person could cope single-handed. The man who had occupied this hole, one Dan Cullen, docker, was dying in hospital. Yet he had impressed his personality on his miserable surroundings sufficiently to give an inkling as to what sort of man he was. On the walls were cheap pictures of Garibaldi, Engels, Dan Burns,...