tribute to the evening's entertainment became
so irrepressible, that the difficulty became at last
to discover who was not singing. The members
of the company, indeed, who were "willing to
oblige," seemed not only to derive no
discouragement from a consideration of the fact
that several other harmonists were already in
full tongue, but they even appeared to find in
this circumstance an additional stimulus to
greater exertion; and so one after another
would add his voice to those previously in
operation, and as each had a tune and words
of his own, the effect was very striking
indeed. Meantime the hammer of the chairman
was not idle, but was busily and incessantly
worked by its possessor as a restorative of
order; nor was this instrument left wholly
unsupported and alone. In various other parts of
the room, other, and hitherto silent, hammers
sprang into view, and while the chair at one end
of this hall of harmony, and the vice at the
other, battered away at their respective tables,
the treasurer, suddenly shutting the room-door,
probably to keep the sound in, began to hammer
away at the panels in a workmanlike style,
roaring the while to a distant friend to stand
up and address the society on their disorderly
conduct. The friend thus conjured, responded
to the appeal, and, mounting on a bench,
commenced a speech which was wholly inaudible,
but which would doubtless, in spite of this
circumstance, have attained to considerable length,
had not the orator suddenly missed his footing,
and lost himself in an abyss of pint-pots and
spittoons underneath the table. It was at this
time that a band of three performers, which
suddenly appeared in the room, struck up a lively
air; while several babies, dispersed in different
quarters of the apartment, lifted up their voices
in bitter but justifiable complainings.

The climax was attained; it was nearly twelve
o'clock, the house had to be cleared by
midnight; so the treasurer (there being no more
halfpence in prospect) rose upon a table to
report progress and dissolve the meeting, in a
brief speech. There was a pause while this
oration was delivered, but afterwards the din
broke out again more furiously than before.

"Ladies and gentlemen," said the treasurer—
and his speech is a model on which it would be
well if some diffuse orators would build their
style—"beg to say—very much obliged—
support—sum collected amounts to THREE POUNDS
TWO SHILLINGS—thank you all round."

This announcement, which was received with
much applause, was the signal for the gradual
breaking up of the assembly. In the midst of all
the jollification and riot, it was curious to think
what it was that had brought it all about.
Reminded constantly by the deep mourning band on
the hat of the poor suicide's father of the real
nature of this orgie, it was strange and painful
to contrast the scene with the circumstance
which had preceded it. To think of the girl
coming home from her work, appearing a little
"odd like" to her friends; of her leaving the
room, and presently returning to announce that
she HAD DONE IT; to think of the brief interval
of incredulity, the season when no one—perhaps
hardly the girl herself—could realise what had
happened; to think of the symptoms that told
the truth too plainly, of the flight to the
hospital, of the eager medical questionings, the
antidotes, the remedies applied in vain; to think
of the death, the inquest, the squalid funeral,
but just over; to think of these things, and
then to look round and note the frantic mirth
of the company assembled to do honour to this
Friendly Lead, and their apparent oblivion of
its origin, was surely to compare and bring
together two ghastly phases of human existence.

"In proportion as you descend in the social
scale, the indifference to death seems to become
more strongly developed," was the remark made
a few days since in the writer's hearing by one
of the greatest of our medical authorities. At
the last of these "Leads" in Bethnal-green,
before this which was attended by your Eye-
witness, the proceeds of the occasion were
dedicated to the use of a woman who had lost her
husband. The widow herself attended the
festival, and joined to such purpose in the conviviality
of the meeting, that at last she jumped upon
a bench to sing a song, which came to an untimely
end because she was too drunk to finish it.

And yet, however occasionally grotesque and
terrible in the manner of its carrying out, a
"Lead" of this kind is, in the main, good in its
intention and useful in its results. It is one
more instance of the poor appealing to the poor,
of the needy assisting the needy. The writer,
sitting at his post of observation near the door
of the room, felt something akin to shame, as he
watched the rapid filling of the plate, as he noted
the obvious poverty of those who dropped a
portion of their small and hardly earned wages into
it, and as the staunchness with which these poor
people stick by each other forced itself more and
more strongly on his attention. Not only did
every person who entered the room place a
contribution in the plate, not only did those who had
taken the trouble to dispose of tickets among
their friends arrive with the proceeds of their
sale, but afterwards and throughout the evening
more contributions would come in from the
workmen and workwomen assembled in the
room, and one among them—invariably a woman
—would be sent by the others to put sixpence or
a shilling in the plate. The woman would at
such times be asked whom the money came from,
and would answer "she didn't know, it had been
given to her to bring—some of them had made
it up among themselves, she supposed."

"Our web of life is of a mingled yam, the
good and ill together."

The Fifth Journey of
THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER,
A SERIES OF OCCASIONAL JOURNEYS,
BY CHARLES DICKENS,
Will appear in No. 48.