I flashed my gaze from her to him.  So that was the charge, self-murder.  He stood there dazed and unheeding, his bonny brown hair rumpled down his forehead, his face haggard and careworn and boyish still.

“Yes, sir,” the lock-keeper’s wife was saying.  “As fast as I pulled to get ’im out, ’e crawled back.  Then I called for ’elp, and some workmen ’appened along, and we got ’im out and turned ’im over to the constable.”

The magistrate complimented the woman on her muscular powers, and the court-room laughed; but all I could see was a boy on the threshold of life, passionately crawling to muddy death, and there was no laughter in it.

A man was now in the witness-box, testifying to the boy’s good character and giving extenuating evidence.  He was the boy’s foreman, or had been.  Alfred was a good boy, but he had had lots of trouble at home, money matters.  And then his mother was sick.  He was given to worrying, and he worried over it till he laid himself out and wasn’t fit for work.  He (the foreman), for the sake of his own reputation, the boy’s work being bad, had been forced to ask him to resign.

“Anything to say?” the magistrate demanded abruptly.

The boy in the dock mumbled something indistinctly.  He was still dazed.

“What does he say, constable?” the magistrate asked impatiently.

The stalwart man in blue bent his ear to the prisoner’s lips, and then replied loudly, “He says he’s very sorry, your Worship.”

“Remanded,” said his Worship; and the next case was under way, the first witness already engaged in taking the oath.  The boy, dazed and unheeding, passed out with the jailer.  That was all, five minutes from start to finish; and two hulking brutes in the dock were trying strenuously to shift the responsibility of the possession of a stolen fishing-pole, worth probably ten cents.

The chief trouble with these poor folk is that they do not know how to commit suicide, and usually have to make two or three attempts before they succeed.  This, very naturally, is a horrid nuisance to the constables and magistrates, and gives them no end of trouble.  Sometimes, however, the magistrates are frankly outspoken about the matter, and censure the prisoners for the slackness of their attempts.  For instance Mr. R. S—–­, chairman of the S—–­ B—–­ magistrates, in the case the other day of Ann Wood, who tried to make away with herself in the canal:  “If you wanted to do it, why didn’t you do it and get it done with?” demanded the indignant Mr. R. S—–.  “Why did you not get under the water and make an end of it, instead of giving us all this trouble and bother?”

Poverty, misery, and fear of the workhouse, are the principal causes of suicide among the working classes.  “I’ll drown myself before I go into the workhouse,” said Ellen Hughes Hunt, aged fifty-two.  Last Wednesday they held an inquest on her body at Shoreditch.  Her husband came from the Islington Workhouse to testify.  He had been a cheesemonger, but failure in business and poverty had driven him into the workhouse, whither his wife had refused to accompany him.