ladder into the pit of perdition, excessive
drinking; second step, loss of character;
third step, loss of employment; fourth
step, the pawnbroker; fifth step, more
drink; sixth step, desperation; seventh
step, beggary and begging letters; eighth
step, prison; ninth step, the workhouse.
He had been a 'jolly good fellow,' as
the saying is; but the jolly good fellows
with whom he loved to associate, or who
loved to associate with him, forgot his
good fellowship as soon as his coat began
to grow threadbare, and as he himself
began to hint that the loan of half-a-crown
would be useful. Nobody sent
him any tea or tobacco. Nobody ever so
much as inquired after him. Only once a
poor penny-a-liner—a real penny-a-liner,
with scarcely a shoe to his feet, and
with eyes that looked excessively beery—
who came to report an inquest on the body
of an old woman found dead in her bed,
gave him a sixpence. I am sure the poor
young man could ill afford it. 'Thank you,
my dear fellow,' said Montague, 'I accept
it as a loan. Keep out of this place, if you
can; except in the way of business. There'll
be an inquest on me some day, perhaps, and
as you know something about me, you can
lengthen out your report to the extent of
sixpence; and so repay yourself!' Now,
this Montague was one of the class that
ought not to come into the workhouse, and
he could certainly have kept out if he
would.

"There was another with me up to a
short time ago, who had been a great
cheese merchant. He knew all about
cheese, and made a fortune out of it. His
name was—never mind—call him Jones;
and before he was fifty he had scraped up
fifty thousand pounds, all out of cheese.
Unluckily for him, he retired from the
cheese business to live quietly on his money.
But quietness did not suit him, and he had
scarcely been a twelvemonth trying to live
like a gentleman, his idea of a gentleman
being a person who had nothing to do,
than he could stand that kind of life no
longer, and went rioting roaring mad into
speculations of all kinds. What it had
taken him five-and-twenty years to build
up with honest cheeses he knocked down
in three years with rash, foolish, grasping
speculations, that had no bottom in
them. He 'bust up,' as the Yankees
say, and escaped with about a thousand
pounds.  With that he went into the
cheese business again. But there was
another man in his old shop, who had
'got the pull,' as they say, and Jones
could not rival the new man, for all his
knowledge of the article. Besides, he was
down; and I do believe, whatever the
world may say to the contrary, that when
a man is down everybody, or almost everybody,
has a malicious pleasure in trying to
keep him down. The world will help a
young man forward, if he be honest, and
straightforward, and likely to do well;
but it won't help an old man who has
had his chance and lost it. At least,
that's my experience.  When you have
come to be sixty, you must have often been
in people's way; and if those people live,
and have got you out of the way, they
don't give themselves much trouble to help
you into the way again. You are under
the feet of the crowd, and the crowd rushing
on its own business, will trample you to
death, without thinking about you. After
four or five years of new struggle in the
cheese line, Mr. Jones gave it up as a bad
job, and passed into my care. He passed
out of it, however, before long, not into
the next world, which might have been
about the best thing, but into the County
Lunatic Asylum. There he is still, and
great upon cheese.  He buys cheese by
the thousand tons at a time, in his
fancy, and drives a roaring trade.
Perhaps the poor old man is happy. I trust
he may be; but if he had had ordinary
common sense, he would neither have
come to the workhouse nor to the lunatic
asylum."

"It is good, after all," said I, "that
there are workhouses and lunatic asylums
to receive these waifs and strays of
Fortune. But for my part, I am far more
interested in the last of the three classes
of people into which you divided the world
—those who must come to the workhouse,
struggle against it as they will. It seems
to me that these are among the very
saddest products of our civilisation, and that
such people, call them what we will, are born
slaves and pariahs, though they may not
know it, to whom the world offers nothing
from the outset to the end of their career
but toil; toil from youth to maturity, and
from maturity to old age, until the grave
receives them."

"No," said Mr. Gomm, all his double
consonant bristling in his face. "You are
not altogether right.  There are such
people, too many of them, God knows,
and I shall speak of them by-and-bye;
but the mass of the poor—I know them, or ought
to know—are not people who do, or who