The Peg.
And I believe that this claim for a healthy body for all of us carries with it all other due claims; for who knows where the seeds of disease, which even rich people suffer from, were first sown? From the luxury of an ancestor, perhaps; yet often, I suspect, from his poverty.
-WILLIAM MORRIS.
BUT, AFTER CARRYING THE BANNER all night, I did not sleep in Green Park when morning dawned.I was wet to the skin, it is true, and I had had no sleep for twenty-four hours; but, still adventuring as a penniless man looking for work, I had to look about me, first for a breakfast, and next for the work.
During the night I had heard of a place over on the Surrey side of the Thames, where the Salvation Army every Sunday morning gave away a breakfast to the unwashed.(And, by the way, the men who carry the banner are unwashed in the morning, and unless it is raining they do not have much show for a wash, either.) This, thought I, is the very thing,- breakfast in the morning, and then the whole day in which to look for work.
It was a weary walk.Down St.James Street I dragged my tired legs, along Pall Mall, past Trafalgar Square, to the Strand.I crossed the Waterloo Bridge to the Surrey side, cut across to Blackfriars Road, coming out near the Surrey Theatre, and arrived at the Salvation Army barracks before seven o'clock.This was 'the peg.' And by 'the peg,' in the argot, is meant the place where a free meal may be obtained.
Here was a motley crowd of woebegone wretches who had spent the night in the rain.Such prodigious misery! and so much of it! Old men, young men, all manner of men, and boys to boot, and all manner of boys.Some were drowsing standing up; half a score of them were stretched out on the stone steps in most painful postures, all of them sound asleep, the skin of their bodies showing red through the holes and rents in their rags.And up and down the street and across the street for a block either way, each doorstep had from two to three occupants, all asleep, their heads bent forward on their knees.And, it must be remembered, these are not hard times in England.Things are going on very much as they ordinarily do, and times are neither hard nor easy.