stations, a third-class ticket was now shoved out to me as a matter of
course.

But there was compensation for it all. For the first time I met the
English lower classes face to face, and knew them for what they were.
When loungers and workmen, at street corners and in public-houses, talked
with me, they talked as one man to another, and they talked as natural
men should talk, without the least idea of getting anything out of me for
what they talked or the way they talked.

And when at last I made into the East End, I was gratified to find that
the fear of the crowd no longer haunted me. I had become a part of it.
The vast and malodorous sea had welled up and over me, or I had slipped
gently into it, and there was nothing fearsome about it--with the one
exception of the stoker's singlet.




CHAPTER II--JOHNNY UPRIGHT


I shall not give you the address of Johnny Upright. Let it suffice that
he lives in the most respectable street in the East End--a street that
would be considered very mean in America, but a veritable oasis in the
desert of East London. It is surrounded on every side by close-packed
squalor and streets jammed by a young and vile and dirty generation; but
its own pavements are comparatively bare of the children who have no
other place to play, while it has an air of desertion, so few are the
people that come and go.