One old woman, between fifty and sixty, a sheer wreck, I had noticed earlier in the night standing in Piccadilly, not far from Leicester Square.  She seemed to have neither the sense nor the strength to get out of the rain or keep walking, but stood stupidly, whenever she got the chance, meditating on past days, I imagine, when life was young and blood was warm.  But she did not get the chance often.  She was moved on by every policeman, and it required an average of six moves to send her doddering off one man’s beat and on to another’s.  By three o’clock, she had progressed as far as St. James Street, and as the clocks were striking four I saw her sleeping soundly against the iron railings of Green Park.  A brisk shower was falling at the time, and she must have been drenched to the skin.

Now, said I, at one o’clock, to myself; consider that you are a poor young man, penniless, in London Town, and that to-morrow you must look for work.  It is necessary, therefore, that you get some sleep in order that you may have strength to look for work and to do work in case you find it.

So I sat down on the stone steps of a building.  Five minutes later a policeman was looking at me.  My eyes were wide open, so he only grunted and passed on.  Ten minutes later my head was on my knees, I was dozing, and the same policeman was saying gruffly, “’Ere, you, get outa that!”

I got.  And, like the old woman, I continued to get; for every time I dozed, a policeman was there to rout me along again.  Not long after, when I had given this up, I was walking with a young Londoner (who had been out to the colonies and wished he were out to them again), when I noticed an open passage leading under a building and disappearing in darkness.  A low iron gate barred the entrance.

“Come on,” I said.  “Let’s climb over and get a good sleep.”

“Wot?” he answered, recoiling from me.  “An’ get run in fer three months!  Blimey if I do!”

Later on I was passing Hyde Park with a young boy of fourteen or fifteen, a most wretched-looking youth, gaunt and hollow-eyed and sick.

“Let’s go over the fence,” I proposed, “and crawl into the shrubbery for a sleep.  The bobbies couldn’t find us there.”

“No fear,” he answered.  “There’s the park guardians, and they’d run you in for six months.”

Times have changed, alas!  When I was a youngster I used to read of homeless boys sleeping in doorways.  Already the thing has become a tradition.  As a stock situation it will doubtless linger in literature for a century to come, but as a cold fact it has ceased to be.  Here are the doorways, and here are the boys, but happy conjunctions are no longer effected.  The doorways remain empty, and the boys keep awake and carry the banner.

“I was down under the arches,” grumbled another young fellow.  By “arches” he meant the shore arches where begin the bridges that span the Thames.  “I was down under the arches wen it was ryning its ‘ardest, an’ a bobby comes in an’ chyses me out.  But I come back, an’ ’e come too.  ‘’Ere,’ sez ’e, ‘wot you doin’ ‘ere?’ An’ out I goes, but I sez, ’Think I want ter pinch [steal] the bleedin’ bridge?’”