Do you know that music of the obscure ways, to which children dance?  Not if you have only heard it ground to your ears’ affliction beneath your windows in the square.  To hear it aright you must stand in the darkness of such a by-street as this, and for the moment be at one with those who dwell around, in the blear-eyed houses, in the dim burrows of poverty, in the unmapped haunts of the semi-human.  Then you will know the significance of that vulgar clanging of melody; a pathos of which you did not dream will touch you, and therein the secret of hidden London will be half revealed.  The life of men who toil without hope, yet with the hunger of an unshaped desire; of women in whom the sweetness of their sex is perishing under labour and misery; the laugh, the song of the girl who strives to enjoy her year or two of youthful vigour, knowing the darkness of the years to come; the careless defiance of the youth who feels his blood and revolts against the lot which would tame it; all that is purely human in these darkened multitudes speaks to you as you listen.  It is the half-conscious striving of a nature which knows not what it would attain, which deforms a true thought by gross expression, which clutches at the beautiful and soils it with foul hands.

The children were dirty and ragged, several of them barefooted, nearly all bare-headed, but they danced with noisy merriment.  One there was, a little girl, on crutches; incapable of taking a partner, she stumped round and round, circling upon the pavement, till giddiness came upon her and she had to fall back and lean against the wall, laughing aloud at her weakness.  Gilbert stepped up to her, and put a penny into her hand; then, before she had recovered from her surprise, passed onwards.’—­(p. 111.)

This superb piece of imaginative prose, of which Shorthouse himself might have been proud,[9] is recalled by an answering note in Ryecroft, in which he says, ‘I owe many a page to the street-organs.’

And, where the pathos has to be distilled from dialogue, I doubt if the author of Jack himself could have written anything more restrainedly touching or in a finer taste than this:—­

[Footnote 9:  I am thinking, in particular, of the old vielle-player’s conversation in chap. xxiii. of John Inglesant; of the exquisite passage on old dance music—­its inexpressible pathos—­in chap. xxv.]

    ’Laughing with kindly mirth, the old man drew on his woollen gloves
    and took up his hat and the violin-bag.  Then he offered to say
    good-bye.

    “But you’re forgetting your top-coat, grandad,” said Lydia.

    “I didn’t come in it, my dear.”

    “What’s that, then?  I’m sure we don’t wear such things.”

    She pointed to a chair, on which Thyrza had just artfully spread the
    gift.  Mr. Boddy looked in a puzzled way; had he really come in his
    coat and forgotten it?  He drew nearer.