He looked round.  He thought of his various speeches.  It was no use telling these people how many more women were arrested for drunkenness in the streets this year than last, nor how many families lived in cellars, nor how many men were without work.  Their imaginations, never straying into large numbers, would be blank.  He would tell them stories of men and women like themselves, and of how they managed when calamity came.  He had sheaves of such stories and a ready tongue.  He might strike a spark of understanding.  His voice, as he began to speak, belied his appearance.  It was sonorous and beautiful and it immediately controlled his audience.

“My dear friends!  Just round the corner from the house where I live, there’s a street called ‘Paradise Street,’ but I can tell you as I came along here this morning in the lanes by the chapel, it seemed to me a good deal more like Paradise than that street.  It was a treat to smell hawthorn hedges again, and to see some clear sky again, after the foundries of stone-work, and I don’t know what it is that makes people give names like Angel Meadow, Paradise Row, Greenfield Street to the dirtiest and smelliest streets in all the town.  But I’ve got some very good friends in this particular Paradise Street I was talking of, and if they don’t get an abundant entrance into the Paradise of our Saviour when their time comes, I’ve mistaken His loving-kindness very sadly.

“Now, you’d hardly think that an old woman could be very happy living in a cellar, without even a proper window to put a plant in, and six steps to come up and down every time she went out and in, and drunken men cursing and blaspheming up above in the street!  Well!  I’m going to tell you a tale of one of the happiest old women I know, but I’m afraid it’s got to be about a day on which she wasn’t happy at all.

“Her name’s Jane Clark, and she lives in that cellar I’m speaking of on 2s. 6d. a week she has from the parish.  She’s a widow, and some of you women know what that means.  She pays 1s. 3d. for her share of the cellar, for you know in towns such as I come from, we’re building so many factories, and railway sheds, and what not, that we’ve no room left to live in, so Mrs Clark had to share even her cellar.  Many a time when I passed down that dreadful street and hadn’t time to go in, I’d just shout down the cellar and she’d have an answer back in no time.  I used to go down for a few minutes, just to cheer myself up a bit, for there’s a lot of discouraging things happen in our sort of work, and she always made me ashamed.  She was so content, never wanting more and always thankful for what she had.

“Well! one day I was in Paradise Street.  It was wet and cold, and the beer-shops were full of drunken men and women, and even the children were shouting foul language.

“‘O God,’ I said, ready to cry out in the street, ’How long will the power of the devil last in this town?’ However, I thought of Mrs Clark down there, and how she had to live in it all, so I went down the steps, and there she was, but I could see that even she had been crying.