brother whose conduct had given rise to suspicion among his companions,
and "spies" and "police plots" were in every one's mouth. The office of
the _Bomb_, as being the centre of English anarchy, had been selected
as the scene for an inquiry _en group_ into the matter.

Thus on a wet and chilling January evening--one of those evenings when
London, and more especially squalid London, is at the height of its
unattractiveness--I set out towards my first Anarchist "group-meeting."
And certainly the spirit which moved me from within must have been strong
that the flesh quailed not at the foul scenery amid which my destination
lay.

Half-way down one of the busiest, grimiest, and most depressing streets
in the W.C. district stands a squalid public-house, the type of many
hundreds and thousands of similar dens in the metropolis. The "Myrtle
Grove Tavern," pastoral as the name sounds, was not precisely the abode of
peace and goodwill. From four A.M., when the first of her _habitues_
began to muster round the yet unopened doors, till half-past twelve P.M.,
when the last of them was expelled by the sturdy "chucker-out," the
atmosphere was dense with the foul breath and still fouler language of
drunken and besotted men and women. Every phase of the lower order of
British drinker and drunkard was represented here. The coarse oaths of the
men, mingled with the shriller voices of their female companions, and the
eternal "'e saids" and "she saids" of the latter's complaints and disputes
were interrupted by the plaintive wailings of the puny, gin-nourished
infants at their breasts. Here, too, sat the taciturn man, clay pipe in
mouth, on his accustomed bench day after day, year in year out, gazing
with stony and blear-eyed indifference on all that went on around him;
deaf, dumb, and unseeing; only spitting deliberately at intervals, and
with apparently no other vocation in life than the consumption of