They are wet with the showers of the mountains, and embrace the rock
for want of a shelter.
There are that pluck the fatherless from the breast, and take a pledge
of the poor.
So that they go about naked without clothing, and being an hungered
they carry the sheaves.--Job xxiv. 2-10.
Seven and twenty centuries agone! And it is all as true and apposite to-
day in the innermost centre of this Christian civilisation whereof Edward
VII. is king.
CHAPTER XIII--DAN CULLEN, DOCKER
I stood, yesterday, in a room in one of the "Municipal Dwellings," not
far from Leman Street. If I looked into a dreary future and saw that I
would have to live in such a room until I died, I should immediately go
down, plump into the Thames, and cut the tenancy short.
It was not a room. Courtesy to the language will no more permit it to be
called a room than it will permit a hovel to be called a mansion. It was
a den, a lair. Seven feet by eight were its dimensions, and the ceiling
was so low as not to give the cubic air space required by a British
soldier in barracks. A crazy couch, with ragged coverlets, occupied
nearly half the room. A rickety table, a chair, and a couple of boxes
left little space in which to turn around.
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