Sometimes on a Sunday evening the ministers of the Baptist chapel would come in to supper after the meeting.  The elder was a silver-haired old man, who loved me; and I loved him, too, for there were always lollipops in his pocket for me and for my only sister Susan.  The other was a younger man, tall and dark.  He preached a harsher doctrine than his gentler colleague, and was much the greater favourite at the chapel.  I hated him; and years later he married my sister.

When I had turned thirteen, my father’s brother, who had risen in wealth, and now was the owner of a first-rate grocery business in the City and a pleasant villa at Herne Hill, and had a son preparing for Cambridge, came to visit us.  When he had gone my mother told me, very solemnly and slowly, that I was to be sent to a tailor’s workrooms the next day.

What could my uncle make me but a tailor—­or a shoemaker?  A pale, consumptive boy, all forehead and no muscle.

With a beating heart I shambled along by my mother’s side to Mr. Smith’s shop, in a street off Piccadilly, and here Mr. Smith handed me over to Mr. Jones, the foreman, with instructions to “take the young man upstairs to the workroom.”

I stumbled after Mr. Jones up a dark, narrow, iron staircase till we emerged through a trap-door into a garret at the top of the house.  I recoiled with disgust at the scene before me; and here I was to work—­perhaps through life!  A low room, stifling me with the combined odours of human breath and perspiration, stale beer, the sweet sickly smell of gin, and the sour and hardly less disgusting one of new cloth.  On the floor, thick with dust and dirt, scraps of stuff and ends of thread, sat some dozen haggard, untidy, shoeless men, with a mingled look of care and recklessness that made me shudder.  The windows were tight-closed to keep out the cold winter air, and the condensed breath ran in streams down the panes.

The foreman turned to one of the men, and said, “Here, Crossthwaite, take this younker and make a tailor of him.  Keep him next you, and prick him with your needle if he shirks.”

Mechanically, as if in a dream, I sat down, and as the foreman vanished a burst of chatter rose.  A tall, sharp-nosed young man bawled in my ear, “I say, young ’un, do you know why we’re nearer heaven here than our neighbours?”

“Why?” I asked.

“Acause we’re the top of the house in the first place, and next place yer’ll die here six months sooner nor if yer worked in the room below.  Concentrated essence of man’s flesh is this here as you’re a-breathing.  Cellar workroom we calls Rheumatic Ward, acause of the damp.  Ground floor’s Fever Ward—­your nose’d tell yer why if you opened the back windy.  First floor’s Ashmy Ward—­don’t you hear ’um now through the cracks in the boards, apuffing away like a nest of young locomotives?  And this here most august and uppercrust cock-loft is the Consumptive Hospital.  First you begins to cough, then you proceeds to expectorate, and then when you’ve sufficiently covered the poor dear shivering backs of the hairystocracy—­