“There’s chaps in London,” said a man across the table from me, “that get all the tommy they want, an’ they never think o’ goin’ to the country.  Stay in London the year ‘round.  Nor do they think of lookin’ for a kip [place to sleep], till nine or ten o’clock at night.”

A general chorus verified this statement

“But they’re bloomin’ clever, them chaps,” said an admiring voice.

“Course they are,” said another voice.  “But it’s not the likes of me an’ you can do it.  You got to be born to it, I say.  Them chaps ’ave ben openin’ cabs an’ sellin’ papers since the day they was born, an’ their fathers an’ mothers before ’em.  It’s all in the trainin’, I say, an’ the likes of me an’ you ’ud starve at it.”

This also was verified by the general chorus, and likewise the statement that there were “mugs as lives the twelvemonth ‘round in the spike an’ never get a blessed bit o’ tommy other than spike skilly an’ bread.”

“I once got arf a crown in the Stratford spike,” said a new voice.  Silence fell on the instant, and all listened to the wonderful tale.  “There was three of us breakin’ stones.  Winter-time, an’ the cold was cruel.  T’other two said they’d be blessed if they do it, an’ they didn’t; but I kept wearin’ into mine to warm up, you know.  An’ then the guardians come, an’ t’other chaps got run in for fourteen days, an’ the guardians, w’en they see wot I’d been doin’, gives me a tanner each, five o’ them, an’ turns me up.”

The majority of these men, nay, all of them, I found, do not like the spike, and only come to it when driven in.  After the “rest up” they are good for two or three days and nights on the streets, when they are driven in again for another rest.  Of course, this continuous hardship quickly breaks their constitutions, and they realise it, though only in a vague way; while it is so much the common run of things that they do not worry about it.

“On the doss,” they call vagabondage here, which corresponds to “on the road” in the United States.  The agreement is that kipping, or dossing, or sleeping, is the hardest problem they have to face, harder even than that of food.  The inclement weather and the harsh laws are mainly responsible for this, while the men themselves ascribe their homelessness to foreign immigration, especially of Polish and Russian Jews, who take their places at lower wages and establish the sweating system.

By seven o’clock we were called away to bathe and go to bed.  We stripped our clothes, wrapping them up in our coats and buckling our belts about them, and deposited them in a heaped rack and on the floor—­a beautiful scheme for the spread of vermin.  Then, two by two, we entered the bathroom.  There were two ordinary tubs, and this I know:  the two men preceding had washed in that water, we washed in the same water, and it was not changed for the two men that followed us.  This I know; but I am also certain that the twenty-two of us washed in the same water.