He took to his bed in his terrible den, which grew more terrible with his helplessness.  He was without kith or kin, a lonely old man, embittered and pessimistic, fighting vermin the while and looking at Garibaldi, Engels, and Dan Burns gazing down at him from the blood-bespattered walls.  No one came to see him in that crowded municipal barracks (he had made friends with none of them), and he was left to rot.

But from the far reaches of the East End came a cobbler and his son, his sole friends.  They cleansed his room, brought fresh linen from home, and took from off his limbs the sheets, greyish-black with dirt.  And they brought to him one of the Queen’s Bounty nurses from Aldgate.

She washed his face, shook up his conch, and talked with him.  It was interesting to talk with him—­until he learned her name.  Oh, yes, Blank was her name, she replied innocently, and Sir George Blank was her brother.  Sir George Blank, eh? thundered old Dan Cullen on his death-bed; Sir George Blank, solicitor to the docks at Cardiff, who, more than any other man, had broken up the Dockers’ Union of Cardiff, and was knighted?  And she was his sister?  Thereupon Dan Cullen sat up on his crazy couch and pronounced anathema upon her and all her breed; and she fled, to return no more, strongly impressed with the ungratefulness of the poor.

Dan Cullen’s feet became swollen with dropsy.  He sat up all day on the side of the bed (to keep the water out of his body), no mat on the floor, a thin blanket on his legs, and an old coat around his shoulders.  A missionary brought him a pair of paper slippers, worth fourpence (I saw them), and proceeded to offer up fifty prayers or so for the good of Dan Cullen’s soul.  But Dan Cullen was the sort of man that wanted his soul left alone.  He did not care to have Tom, Dick, or Harry, on the strength of fourpenny slippers, tampering with it.  He asked the missionary kindly to open the window, so that he might toss the slippers out.  And the missionary went away, to return no more, likewise impressed with the ungratefulness of the poor.

The cobbler, a brave old hero himself, though unaneled and unsung, went privily to the head office of the big fruit brokers for whom Dan Cullen had worked as a casual labourer for thirty years.  Their system was such that the work was almost entirely done by casual hands.  The cobbler told them the man’s desperate plight, old, broken, dying, without help or money, reminded them that he had worked for them thirty years, and asked them to do something for him.

“Oh,” said the manager, remembering Dan Cullen without having to refer to the books, “you see, we make it a rule never to help casuals, and we can do nothing.”