These two men, turned away from the casual ward of Whitechapel Workhouse, were bound with me for Poplar Workhouse.  Not much of a show, they thought, but to chance it was all that remained to us.  It was Poplar, or the streets and night.  Both men were anxious for a bed, for they were “about gone,” as they phrased it.  The Carter, fifty-eight years of age, had spent the last three nights without shelter or sleep, while the Carpenter, sixty-five years of age, had been out five nights.

But, O dear, soft people, full of meat and blood, with white beds and airy rooms waiting you each night, how can I make you know what it is to suffer as you would suffer if you spent a weary night on London’s streets!  Believe me, you would think a thousand centuries had come and gone before the east paled into dawn; you would shiver till you were ready to cry aloud with the pain of each aching muscle; and you would marvel that you could endure so much and live.  Should you rest upon a bench, and your tired eyes close, depend upon it the policeman would rouse you and gruffly order you to “move on.”  You may rest upon the bench, and benches are few and far between; but if rest means sleep, on you must go, dragging your tired body through the endless streets.  Should you, in desperate slyness, seek some forlorn alley or dark passageway and lie down, the omnipresent policeman will rout you out just the same.  It is his business to rout you out.  It is a law of the powers that be that you shall be routed out.

But when the dawn came, the nightmare over, you would hale you home to refresh yourself, and until you died you would tell the story of your adventure to groups of admiring friends.  It would grow into a mighty story.  Your little eight-hour night would become an Odyssey and you a Homer.

Not so with these homeless ones who walked to Poplar Workhouse with me.  And there are thirty-five thousand of them, men and women, in London Town this night.  Please don’t remember it as you go to bed; if you are as soft as you ought to be 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 unrefreshed, 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 thoroughfare, 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.