came up one by one, in alternate sexes, as
they had been summoned from the
semicircle outside. Now it was a young sailor-
boy in a Guernsey frock; now a travel-
stained agricultural labourer; now a wan
artisan; now a weary ragged woman with a
troop of children; now, most pitiable
spectacle of all, some woe-begone, shrinking
needlewoman—young, but a hundred years
old in misery—comely, but absolutely
seamed and scarred and macerated by famine.
The answers were almost identical: They had
come up from the country in search of work;
or they were London bred, and could not
obtain work; or the Union was full, and they
could not get admission; or they had no
money; or they had had nothing to eat; or they
did not know where else to go. All this was
said not volubly; not entreatingly; and with
no ejaculations or complaints and with few
additions; but wearily, curtly, almost reluctantly.
What had they to tell? What beyond a
name, a date, a place, was necessary to be
extracted from them? In their dismal
attire, in their deathlike voices, in their
awful faces, there was mute eloquence
enough to fill five hundred ledgers such as
the one on the desk. I am no professed
physiognomist. I believe I have sufficient
knowledge of the street-world to tell a professional
beggar from a starving man; but I declare I
saw no face that night passing the hatch but
in which I could read: Ragged and Tired—
Dead Beat—Utterly Destitute—Houseless
and Hungry. The official took down each
applicant's name, age, and birthplace; where
he had slept the night before; what was his
vocation; what the cause of his coming
there. The ledger was divided into columns
for the purpose. I looked over it. To the
causes for application there was one unvarying
answer—Destitution. In the "Where
slept the previous night?" the answers ran:
St. Luke's; Whitechapel; in the streets;
Stepney; in the streets, in the streets, and in
the streets again and again, till I grew
sick. Many men are liars, we know; and
among the five hundred destitute wretches
that are nightly sheltered in this place
there may be—I will not attempt to
dispute it—a percentage of impostors; a
few whose own misconduct and
improvidence have driven them to the wretchedest
straits; yet, I will back that grim ledger
to contain some thousand more truths than
are told in a whole library of reports of
parliamentary committees.

There was a lull in the admissions, and I
was inquiring about the Irish, when the
official told the doorkeeper to "call the first
female." By luck, the "first female" was
Irish herself. She was a very little woman,
with the smallest bonnet I ever saw. It was,
positively, nothing more than a black patch
on the back of her head, and the frayed ends
were pulled desperately forward towards her
chin, showing her ears through a ragged
trellis-work. As to her dress, it looked as
if some cunning spinner had manufactured a
textile fabric out of mud; or, as if dirt could
be darned and patched. I did not see her
feet; but I heard a flapping on the floor as
she moved, and guessed what sort of shoes
she must have worn. She was the sort of
little woman who ought to have had a round,
rosy, dumpling face—and she had two bead-
like black eyes; but face and eyes were all
crushed and battered by want and exposure.
Her very skin was in rags. The poor little
woman did nothing but make faces, which
would have been ludicrous, if—in the connection
of what surrounded and covered
her, and her own valiant determination not
to cry—they had not been heart-rending.
Yes; she was Irish, (she said this
apologetically); but, she had been a long
time in Liverpool. Her husband had run
away and left her. She had no children. She
could have borne it better, she said, if she
had. She had slept one night before in the
"Institution" (she prided herself a little on
this word, and used it pretty frequently), but
she had been ashamed to come there again,
and had slept one night in the workhouse and
three nights in the streets. The superintendent
spoke to her kindly, and told her she could
be sheltered in the Refuge for a night or two
longer; and that then, the best thing she
could do would be to make her way to Liverpool
again. "But I can't walk it, indeed,"
cried the little woman; "I shall never be
able to walk it. O, dear! O, dear!" The
valorously screwed-up face broke down all
at once; and, as she went away with her
ticket, I heard her flapping feet and meek
sobs echoing through the corridor. She did
not press her story on us. She did not whine
for sympathy. She seemed ashamed of her
grief. Was this little woman a humbug, I
wonder?

A long lank man in black mud came up
afterwards; whose looks seemed fluttering
between the unmistakeable "ragged and
tired" and an ominous "ragged and
desperate." I shall never forget his hands as
he held them across on the door-sill—long,
emaciated, bony slices of integument and
bone. They were just the hands a man might
do some mischief to himself or some one else
with, and be sorry for. I shall never forget,
either, the rapt eager gaze with which he
regarded, almost devoured, the fire in the office
grate. He answered the questions addressed
to him, as it were mechanically, and without
looking at his interlocutor. His whole attention,
wishes, thoughts, being centred in the
blazing coals. He seemed to hug himself in
the prospective enjoyment of the warmth;
to be greedy of it. Better the fire there,
than the water of the dark cold river. I
was not sorry when he received his
ticket; and, looking over his shoulder at the
fire, went shuffling away. He frightened me.

I was informed by the superintendent