performances, and succeed in making sensible folk laugh immoderately.

I have had to teach East End boys and girls "God save the Queen" with the same painstaking care that I have taught them "Praise God from whom all blessings flow." Even when learnt, neither the National Anthem nor the grand old Doxology has inspired them with any sense of reward for their trouble. My club lads used resolutely to refuse to take off their hats during the singing of the National Anthem; and the crowded audiences invariably attracted by our entertainments would clear off as fast as their legs could carry them, the moment the announcement was made that we would close the proceedings in patriotic fashion.

But the war changed all that. One evening, about a month after fighting began in South Africa, I was amazed to hear the "big drum" of our lads' brigade insisting that the whole company should doff their caps on his striking three thumping beats as a signal for “God save the Queen." "Hats off, please!" cried the "big drum"; and in a moment every head was bared, and a score of lusty young voices took up the familiar strain.

Nowhere does the admirable independence of the East-ender's character show to greater advantage than in his superiority to physical pain. Sylvia cut her finger one day. It bled profusely. "How did you stop the bleeding?" I asked, glancing compassionately at the wounded member.

Oh, dad soon settled that by clapping a teaspoonful of salt on it."

"It hurt, eh?"

The child paused. "Well," she said, with a little ripple of laughter, "it did make me 'op a bit.”

Who ever heard of a factory girl acknowledging herself to be ill? She may be actually dying on her feet; the pressure of her daily toil may have so told upon her as to have utterly undermined her health; as the result of incessant labour under harmful conditions, her whole frame may be honeycombed with disease; but you won't catch her complaining. Not she! There's a many a great deal worse orf than wot she is—that's straight!

You meet a boy in the street with his eye bunged up by a mosquito bite. "Hullo, sonny! Been in the

wars ?"

"Thet ain't nuffink! mouf."

You oughter to see Billy's

"What!" you say to a woman; "got your fingers cut off in the machinery? Poor, poor thing!"

"Lord!" is the laughing reply, "wot's it matter? It'll be all the same in a 'underd years."

It smacks of fatalism, somewhat; but, after all, that is the kind of stuff which, in the past, has made England what she is; and that is the kind of heroism of which any country might well be proud.

Nellie Winder got asbestos in her eyes; her sufferings were terrible. She went up to one of the great London hospitals, and was kept in a draughty hall from half-past eleven to half-past six. There was a crowd of people waiting, for the most part old men, women, and little children; and although it was in the depth of winter, and a bitter north-easter was blowing, not one of the officials who bustled to and fro all day long had the common-sense or common charity to close the windows. But Nellie did not complain. All she said, when narrating the circumstance, was, "Good job I 'adn't to go' in'!"

Young Mathers contracted small-pox. When he was

convalescent, I tried to get him to a home. To my astonishment, nobody would have him. All charitable avenues were rigidly closed against him. That was unfair; it was even indecent. When all has been said that can be said about the need for the most scrupulous care, the fact remains that the small-pox convalescent is as dangerous as every other convalescent, no more and no less. It is unworthy of our common brotherhood that a peculiar stigma should attach to him. To debar him from the help of the benevolent, simply because his sickness has been of a particularly trying kind, is as illogical as it is inhuman. Mathers was obliged to return to his work without a holiday, with the result that it was many months before he recovered his strength. Yet he made no fuss. His only comment was, "I guess they're afraid o' we East End chaps."

And he was about right. The fear of the East End by those who know nothing of it would be ludicrous were it not so sad. As a matter of fact, the West Ferry Road or the Commercial Road is far safer than Regent Street or Oxford Street; and as for women, they are so rarely molested, or even rudely spoken to, that when such a thing occurs it causes quite a sensation. The East End has a bad name; and a place, like a dog, with a bad name is done for. "Can any good come out of Nazareth?"

But I have wandered from my point, which is that the East-ender is a hero of no mean type. He will uncomwould tragically

plainingly endure ills that you and I call heaven and earth to witness. His whole life is so poor, so suffering, so limited, so grey, that one pain, one degradation, one misery, more or less, does not matter. "Well, I shall have to make the best of it," he says.

And thereby hangs the story of his life from the cradle to the grave. He makes the best of it. His motto would seem to be, "Enjoy life if you can, and while you can; and if you can't, don't make a fuss about it."

One winter evening I came across two lads sitting on a doorstep. The one was eating fried fish piping hot from the grill; the other was smoking a cigarette. The cigarettesmoker was a very small boy; and in the course of conversation I ventured to suggest, humbly enough, I trust, that it might be well for him to wait a year or two before indulging in the habit.

"Wot 'o!" observed the elder boy, his mouth full. "E may be a dead 'un by that time. Smoke an' eat". he crammed a huge lump of fish into his mouth"smoke an' eat while you can, I sez."

men.

CHAPTER V

LIMITATIONS

MUCH of this book will be unintelligible unless the peculiar limitations of the East-ender's existence are carefully borne in mind. Millwallers, as I have said, are quite isolated from the rest of London, but hardly more so than are other parts of the East End. Nor, although the East End is fringed along its whole length by the Thames, is this isolation modified to any perceptible degree by the coming and going of seafaring It is amazing that more sailors are not turned out of this water-intersected land. One would imagine that to the growing lad, whose brain is a-teem with romance, the masts that rise everywhere like a winter forest, the great ships cautiously stealing down the river, the dry docks where battered hulks are patched and painted into smart craft, the music of winch and crane, of bell and siren, would fill him with hungry longing for the freedom and joy of a sailor's life. Nothing of the kind. The old salts he knows, who on rare occasions, over pipe and glass, crack of their sea-roving days, are shattered hulks indeed. For them there is no dry dock where they can be furbished up to look like new. They are just a commonplace lot of