Every little while, boys and young men stopped long enough to go behind the bench and give vent to sudden and fiendish shouts.This always jerked the man and woman abruptly from their sleep; and at sight of the startled woe upon their faces the crowd would roar with laughter as it flooded past.
This was the most striking thing, the general heartlessness exhibited on every hand.It is a commonplace, the homeless on the benches, the poor miserable folk who may be teased and are harmless.
Fifty thousand people must have passed the bench while I sat upon it, and not one, on such a jubilee occasion as the crowning of the King, felt his heart-strings touched sufficiently to come up and say to the woman: 'Here's sixpence; go and get a bed.' But the women, especially the young women, made witty remarks upon the woman nodding, and invariably set their companions laughing.
To use a Briticism, it was 'cruel'; the corresponding Americanism was more appropriate- it was 'fierce.' I confess I began to grow incensed at this happy crowd streaming by, and to extract a sort of satisfaction from the London statistics which demonstrate that one in every four adults is destined to die on public charity, either in the workhouse, the infirmary, or the asylum.
I talked with the man.He was fifty-four and a broken-down docker.
He could only find odd work when there was a large demand for labor, for the younger and stronger men were preferred when times were slack.
He had spent a week, now, on the benches of the Embankment; but things looked brighter for next week, and he might possibly get in a few days' work and have a bed in some doss-house.He had lived all his life in London, save for five years, when, in 1878, he saw foreign service in India.