cuffed and cursed. Upon this point he used to get eloquent—as eloquent as he could be, for he had small power of expression, and he would describe to me the despair which came over him down in those dark vaults at the prospect of life continuing after this fashion, and with not the minutest gleam of light even at the very end. Nobody ever cared to know the most ordinary facts about him. Nobody inquired whether he was married or single; nobody troubled himself when he was ill. If he was away, his pay was stopped; and when he returned to work nobody asked if he was better. Who can wonder that at first, when he was an utter stranger in a strange land, he was overcome by the situation, and that the world was to him a dungeon worse than that of Chillon? Who can wonder that he was becoming reckless? A little more of such a life would have transformed him into a brute. He had not the ability to become revolutionary, or it would have made him a conspirator. Suffering of any kind is hard to bear, but the suffering which especially damages character is that which is caused by the neglect or oppression of man. At any rate it was so in Taylor’s case. I believe that he would have been patient under any inevitable ordinance of nature, but he could not lie still under contempt, the knowledge that to those about him he was of less consequence than the mud under their feet. He was timid and, after his failure as a shopkeeper, and the near approach to the workhouse, he dreaded above everything being again cast adrift. Strange conflict arose in him, for the insults to which he was exposed drove him almost to madness; and yet the dread of dismissal in a moment checked him when he was about to “fire up,” as he called it, and reduced him to a silence which was torture. Once he was ordered to bring some coals for the messenger’s lobby. The man who gave him the order, finding that he was a long time bringing them, went to the top of the stairs, and bawled after him with an oath to make haste. The reason of the delay was that Taylor had two loads to bring up—one for somebody else. When he got to the top of the steps, the messenger with another oath took the coals, and saying that he “would teach him to skulk there again,” kicked the other coal-scuttle down to the bottom. Taylor himself told me this; and yet, although he would have rejoiced if the man had dropped down dead, and would willingly have shot him, he was dumb. The check operated in an instant. He saw himself without a penny, and in the streets. He went down into the cellar, and raged and wept for an hour. Had he been a workman, he would probably have throttled his enemy, or tried to do it, or what is more likely, his enemy would not have dared to treat him in such fashion, but he was powerless, and once losing his situation he would have sunk down into the gutter, whence he would have been swept by the parish into the indiscriminate heap of London pauperism, and carted away to the Union, a conclusion which was worse to him than being hung.
Another of our friends was a waiter in one of the public-houses and chophouses combined, of which there are so many in the Strand. He lived in a wretched alley which ran from St. Clement’s Church to Boswell Court—I have forgotten its name—a dark crowded passage. He was a man of about sixty—invariably called John, without the addition of any surname. I knew him long before we opened our room, for I was in the habit of frequently visiting the chophouse in which he served. His hours were incredible. He began at nine o’clock in the morning with sweeping the dining-room, cleaning the tables and the gas globes, and at twelve business commenced with early luncheons. Not till three-quarters of an hour after midnight could he leave, for the house was much used by persons who supped there after the theatres. During almost the whole of this time he was on his legs, and very often he was unable to find two minutes in the day in which to get his dinner. Sundays, however, were free. John was not a head waiter, but merely a subordinate, and I never knew why at his time of life he had not risen to a better position. He used to say that “things had been against him,” and I had no right to seek for further explanations. He was married, and had had three children, of whom one only was living—a boy of ten years old, whom he hoped to get into the public-house as a potboy for a beginning. Like Taylor, the world had well-nigh overpowered John entirely—crushed him out of all shape, so that what he was originally, or might have been, it was almost impossible to tell. There was no particular character left in him. He may once have been this or that, but every angle now was knocked off, as it is knocked off from the rounded pebbles which for ages have been dragged up and down the beach by the waves. For a lifetime he had been exposed to all sorts of whims and caprices, generally speaking of the most unreasonable kind, and he had become so trained to take everything without remonstrance or murmuring that every cross in his life came to him as a chop alleged by an irritated customer to be raw or done to a cinder. Poor wretch! he had one trouble, however, which he could not accept with such equanimity, or rather with such indifference. His wife was a drunkard. This was an awful trial to him. The worst consequence was that his boy knew
