Dan Cullen, Docker.
Life scarce can tread majestically Foul court and fever-stricken alley.
-THOMAS ASHE.
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.Five dollars would have purchased everything in sight.The floor was bare, while the walls and ceiling were literally covered with blood marks and splotches.Each mark represented a violent death-of a bed-bug, with which vermin the building swarmed, a plague with which no person could cope single-handed.
The man who had occupied this hole, one Dan Cullen, docker, was dying in hospital.Yet he had impressed his personality on his miserable surroundings sufficiently to give an inkling as to what sort of a man he was.On the walls were cheap pictures of Garibaldi, Engels, Dan Burns, and other labor leaders, while on the table lay one of Walter Besant's novels.He knew his Shakespeare, I was told, and had read history, sociology, and economics.And he was self-educated.