double tiers were full of lodgers. The floor was strewn with
bodies--naked, half naked and fully clothed. We had to step over them
to get to the other end. There was a stove in the middle of the room,
and beside it, a dirty old lamp shed its yellow rays around, but by no
means lighted the dormitory. The plumbing was open, and the odours
coming therefrom and from the dirty, sweaty bodies of the lodgers and
from the hot air of the stove--windows and doors being tightly
closed--made the atmosphere stifling and suffocating.

After stepping over the prostrate bodies from one end of the dormitory
to the other, the novelist was almost overcome and when we got back to
the door he begged to be taken to the open air. When we got to Chatham
Square, he said--"Take me to a drugstore." Besant knew the underworld
of London as few men of his generation knew it, but he had never seen
anything quite so bestial, so debauched and so low as the bunk-house
on Mulberry Street.

It seems strange to me now that after having tramped the streets of
New York with the unemployed and after having shared their misery,
disappointment and despair, that I should, as a missionary, have
entirely forgotten it, and that after years of experience among them,
I should still be possessed of the idea that men of this grade were
lazy and would not work if they had it. One afternoon in a bunk-house
I was so possessed of this idea that I challenged the crowd.

"You men surely do not need any further evidence of my interest in
you," I remarked. "All that I have and am belongs to you; but I cannot
help telling you of my conviction: that most of you are here because
you are lazy. Now, if any man in the house is willing to test the
case, I will change clothes with him to-morrow morning and show him