or nothing.  When the yard was finally closed he had to cadge about for work.  Fifteen years later he was found in a single room of the meanest tenement-house; his furniture was reduced to a bed, a table, and a chair; all that they had was a little tea and no money—­no money at all.  He was weak and ill, with trudging about in search of work; he was lying exhausted on the bed while his wife sat crouched over the little bit of fire.  This was how they had lived for fifteen years—­the whole time on the verge of starvation.  Well, they were taken away; they were persuaded to leave their quarters and to try anther place, where odd jobs were found for the man, and where the woman made friends in private families, for whom she did a little sewing.  But it was too late for the man; his privations had destroyed his sleight of hand, though he knew it not; the fine workman was gone.  He took painters’ paralysis, and very often when work was offered his hand would drop before he could begin it; then the long years of tramping about had made him restless; from time to time he was fain to borrow a few shillings and to go on the tramp again, pretending that he was in search of work; he would stay away for a fortnight, marching about from place to place, heartily enjoying the change and the social evening at the public-houses where he put up.  For, though no drunkard, he loved to sit in a warm bar and to talk over the splendours of the past.  Then he died.  No one, now looking at the neat old lady in the clean white cap and apron who sits all day in the nursery crooning over her work, would believe that she has gone through this ordeal by famine, and served her fifteen years’ term of starvation for the sins of others.

The Parish of St. James’s, Ratcliff, is the least known of Riverside London.  There is nothing about this parish in the Guide-books; nobody goes to see it.  Why should they?  There is nothing to see.  Yet it is not without its romantic touches.  Once there was here a cross—­the Ratcliff Cross—­but nobody knows what it was, when it was erected, why it was erected, or when it was pulled down.  The oldest inhabitant now at Ratcliff remembers that there was a cross here—­the name survived until the other day, attached to a little street, but that is now gone.  It is mentioned in Dryden.  And on the Queen’s Accession, in 1837, she was proclaimed, among other places, at Ratcliff Cross—­but why, no one knows.  Once the Shipwrights’ Company had their hall here; it stood among gardens where the scent of the gillyflower and the stock mingled with the scent of the tar from the neighbouring rope-yard and boat-building yard.  In the old days, many were the feasts which the jolly shipwrights held in their hall after service at St. Dunstan’s, Stepney.  The hall is now pulled down, and the Company, which is one of the smallest, worth an income of less than a thousand, has never built another.  Then there are the Ratcliff Stairs—­rather dirty and dilapidated to