I did no more than make a show of splashing some of this dubious liquid at myself, while I hastily brushed it off with a towel wet from the bodies of other men.  My equanimity was not restored by seeing the back of one poor wretch a mass of blood from attacks of vermin and retaliatory scratching.

A shirt was handed me—­which I could not help but wonder how many other men had worn; and with a couple of blankets under my arm I trudged off to the sleeping apartment.  This was a long, narrow room, traversed by two low iron rails.  Between these rails were stretched, not hammocks, but pieces of canvas, six feet long and less than two feet wide.  These were the beds, and they were six inches apart and about eight inches above the floor.  The chief difficulty was that the head was somewhat higher than the feet, which caused the body constantly to slip down.  Being slung to the same rails, when one man moved, no matter how slightly, the rest were set rocking; and whenever I dozed somebody was sure to struggle back to the position from which he had slipped, and arouse me again.

Many hours passed before I won to sleep.  It was only seven in the evening, and the voices of children, in shrill outcry, playing in the street, continued till nearly midnight.  The smell was frightful and sickening, while my imagination broke loose, and my skin crept and crawled till I was nearly frantic.  Grunting, groaning, and snoring arose like the sounds emitted by some sea monster, and several times, afflicted by nightmare, one or another, by his shrieks and yells, aroused the lot of us.  Toward morning I was awakened by a rat or some similar animal on my breast.  In the quick transition from sleep to waking, before I was completely myself, I raised a shout to wake the dead.  At any rate, I woke the living, and they cursed me roundly for my lack of manners.

But morning came, with a six o’clock breakfast of bread and skilly, which I gave away, and we were told off to our various tasks.  Some were set to scrubbing and cleaning, others to picking oakum, and eight of us were convoyed across the street to the Whitechapel Infirmary where we were set at scavenger work.  This was the method by which we paid for our skilly and canvas, and I, for one, know that I paid in full many times over.

Though we had most revolting tasks to perform, our allotment was considered the best and the other men deemed themselves lucky in being chosen to perform it.

“Don’t touch it, mate, the nurse sez it’s deadly,” warned my working partner, as I held open a sack into which he was emptying a garbage can.

It came from the sick wards, and I told him that I purposed neither to touch it, nor to allow it to touch me.  Nevertheless, I had to carry the sack, and other sacks, down five flights of stairs and empty them in a receptacle where the corruption was speedily sprinkled with strong disinfectant.

Perhaps there is a wise mercy in all this.  These men of the spike, the peg, and the street, are encumbrances.  They are of no good or use to any one, nor to themselves.  They clutter the earth with their presence, and are better out of the way.  Broken by hardship, ill fed, and worse nourished, they are always the first to be struck down by disease, as they are likewise the quickest to die.