I went back to her.  “Have you ever taken a vacation?” I asked.

“Vycytion!”

“A trip to the country for a couple of days, fresh air, a day off, you know, a rest.”

“Lor’ lumme!” she laughed, for the first time stopping from her work.  “A vycytion, eh? for the likes o’ me?  Just fancy, now!—­Mind yer feet!”—­this last sharply, and to me, as I stumbled over the rotten threshold.

Down near the West India Dock I came upon a young fellow staring disconsolately at the muddy water.  A fireman’s cap was pulled down across his eyes, and the fit and sag of his clothes whispered unmistakably of the sea.

“Hello, mate,” I greeted him, sparring for a beginning.  “Can you tell me the way to Wapping?”

“Worked yer way over on a cattle boat?” he countered, fixing my nationality on the instant.

And thereupon we entered upon a talk that extended itself to a public-house and a couple of pints of “arf an’ arf.”  This led to closer intimacy, so that when I brought to light all of a shilling’s worth of coppers (ostensibly my all), and put aside sixpence for a bed, and sixpence for more arf an’ arf, he generously proposed that we drink up the whole shilling.

“My mate, ‘e cut up rough las’ night,” he explained.  “An’ the bobbies got ‘m, so you can bunk in wi’ me.  Wotcher say?”

I said yes, and by the time we had soaked ourselves in a whole shilling’s worth of beer, and slept the night on a miserable bed in a miserable den, I knew him pretty fairly for what he was.  And that in one respect he was representative of a large body of the lower-class London workman, my later experience substantiates.

He was London-born, his father a fireman and a drinker before him.  As a child, his home was the streets and the docks.  He had never learned to read, and had never felt the need for it—­a vain and useless accomplishment, he held, at least for a man of his station in life.

He had had a mother and numerous squalling brothers and sisters, all crammed into a couple of rooms and living on poorer and less regular food than he could ordinarily rustle for himself.  In fact, he never went home except at periods when he was unfortunate in procuring his own food.  Petty pilfering and begging along the streets and docks, a trip or two to sea as mess-boy, a few trips more as coal-trimmer, and then a full-fledged fireman, he had reached the top of his life.

And in the course of this he had also hammered out a philosophy of life, an ugly and repulsive philosophy, but withal a very logical and sensible one from his point of view.  When I asked him what he lived for, he immediately answered, “Booze.”  A voyage to sea (for a man must live and get the wherewithal), and then the paying off and the big drunk at the end.  After that, haphazard little drunks, sponged in the “pubs” from mates with a few coppers left, like myself, and when sponging was played out another trip to sea and a repetition of the beastly cycle.