“You don’t seem to know who I am,” he said.  I confessed my ignorance.

“Well,” he said, “I’m Connelly, the prize fighter!”

“Then you’re what your profession calls a ’bruiser’.”

“Sure!” he replied.

“Probably you are not aware, Mr. Connelly, that the Bible has something to say about bruisers.”

He explained that, being a Roman Catholic, his Bible was different from mine, and he did not think there were any bruisers in his Bible.

“Oh, you are mistaken, Mr. Connelly.  This is your Bible I have with me”—­and I produced a small Douey Bible, and turning over the pages in Genesis I read a passage which I thought might appeal to him: 

“‘The seed of the woman shall bruise the serpent’s head.’  I suppose you know who the woman was, Connelly.”

“The Holy Virgin?” he inquired.

“Yes; and the serpent is the Devil, and he has been pouring firewater into you and has been making you say things you would not otherwise say.  As for the seed of the woman, that is Jesus Christ; and this Douey Bible of yours tells you that Jesus Christ is able to bruise the head of the old serpent in you, which is the Devil.”  That sounded rather reasonable to the retired prize fighter, and he quieted down and we proceeded with the service.

The society for which I worked, occasionally sent down visitors to be shown around the lodging houses, and often I took them in there myself; but the thing grew very distasteful to me, for I never got hardened or calloused to the misery and sorrow of the situation, and it seemed to me eminently unfair to parade them.

About the last man I took around was Sir Walter Besant.  I dined with him at the Brevoort House one night, and took him around first to one of the bunk-houses and then to various others, and also into the tenement region around Cherry Street.

“Keep close to me,” I told Besant as we entered the bunk house, “don’t linger;” so we went to the top floor.  The strips of canvas arranged in double tiers were full of lodgers.  The floor was strewn with bodies—­naked, half naked and fully clothed.  We had to step over them to get to the other end.  There was a stove in the middle of the room, and beside it, a dirty old lamp shed its yellow rays around, but by no means lighted the dormitory.  The plumbing was open, and the odours coming therefrom and from the dirty, sweaty bodies of the lodgers and from the hot air of the stove—­windows and doors being tightly closed—­made the atmosphere stifling and suffocating.

After stepping over the prostrate bodies from one end of the dormitory to the other, the novelist was almost overcome and when we got back to the door he begged to be taken to the open air.  When we got to Chatham Square, he said—­“Take me to a drugstore.”  Besant knew the underworld of London as few men of his generation knew it, but he had never seen anything quite so bestial, so debauched and so low as the bunk-house on Mulberry Street.