The Gentleman, January 29, 1898.

AFTER MR. MASEFIELD
[Sidenote:  Anon.]

  From ’41 to ’51
  I was an almost model son.

  From ’51 to ’62
  I wished to, but I didn’t do.

  From ’62 to ’67
  I took the shortest cut to heaven.

  From ’67 to ’79
  I only drank one glass of wine.

  From ’79 to ’84
  I felt that I could do with more.

  From ’84 to ’96
  I found how hard it is to mix.

  From ’96 to Nineteen-odd
  Quod: 

MISS STIPP OF PLOVER’S COURT
[Sidenote:  H.B.]

In a neighbourhood of narrow streets and tunnelling alleys, where there are few lamps and the policemen go two and two, where all day long you see fierce-eyed women hooded with shawls coming out of greasy street-doors with jugs in their hands, and where all day long sullen men stand at the dark entry to court and alley with pipes in their mouths and their hands in their pockets, and where the little children “awfully reverse our Saviour’s words, and are not of the Kingdom of Heaven, but of the Kingdom of Hell”—­in this dark, dangerous riverside neighbourhood, with its foul odours and its filthy gutters, lives one of the most defenceless women who ever came into human existence.

I knock at a door in Plover’s Court, and a half-dressed, half-starved, and wholly dirty child, with no boots to her feet, opens to me; and when this miserable heir of the ages, after she has stared at me like a famished animal, learns that I wish to see Miss Stipp, she bids me “go up.”  The narrow passage is hung with two lines of washing; and, pushing through the avenue formed by these dank garments, I catch sight in the stone-paved kitchen beyond of a big-headed, whitewashed-looking infant sprawling on the floor collecting soap-suds, and a woman in the midst of voluminous steam working her arms about in a dripping wash tub.

The stairs up which I make my difficult way are strung with washing as far as the first bend.  The dampness of the atmosphere has converted the dust and grime on banisters, wall, and stairs into a muddy dew.  The little doll’s-house of a place reeks with the suffocating odour of gas, fried fish, onions, and steam.  In one of the two rooms on the first floor, the door of which stands open, I see—­and myself am seen, not to say scowled at, by a couple of pipe-smoking navvies, three or four ragged children, and a little rabbit of a flat-chested woman whose complexion and the colour of her garments bear a striking resemblance to moleskin, and whose thin hair is twisted up in front and held comfortably in its place by a single steel curling-pin which seems to occupy the whole breadth of her forehead.