they cling to life; so few in comparison yield utterly.  The thoughtful in the world above look about them with contentment when carriage-ways are deep with new-fallen snow.  ’Good; here is work for the unemployed.’  Ah, if the winter did but last a few months longer, if the wonted bounds of endurance were but, by some freak of nature, sensibly overpassed, the carriage-ways would find another kind of sweeping! . . .

This winter was the last that Shooter’s Gardens were destined to know.  The leases had all but run out; the middlemen were garnering their latest profits; in the spring there would come a wholesale demolition, and model-lodgings would thereafter occupy the site.  Meanwhile the Gardens looked their surliest; the walls stood in a perpetual black sweat; a mouldy reek came from the open doorways; the beings that passed in and out seemed soaked with grimy moisture, puffed into distortions, hung about with rotting garments.  One such was Mrs. Candy, Pennyloaf’s mother.  Her clothing consisted of a single gown and a shawl made out of the fragments of an old counterpane; her clothing—­with exception of the shoes on her feet, those two articles were literally all that covered her bare body.  Rage for drink was with her reaching the final mania.  Useless to bestow anything upon her; straightway it or its value passed over the counter of the beershop in Rosoman Street.  She cared only for beer, the brave, thick, medicated draught, that was so cheap and frenzied her so speedily.

Her husband was gone for good.  One choking night of November he beat her to such purpose that she was carried off to the police-station as dead; the man effected his escape, and was not likely to show himself in the Gardens again.  With her still lived her son Stephen, the potman.  His payment was ten shillings a week (with a daily allowance of three pints), and he saw to it that there was always a loaf of bread in the room they occupied together.  Stephen took things with much philosophy; his mother would, of course, drink herself to death—­what was there astonishing in that?  He himself had heart disease, and surely enough would drop down dead one of these days; the one doom was no more to be quarrelled with than the other.  Pennyloaf came to see them at very long intervals; what was the use of making her visits more frequent?  She, too, viewed with a certain equanimity the progress of her mother’s fate.  Vain every kind of interposition; worse than imprudence to give the poor creature money or money’s worth.  It could only be hoped that the end would come before very long.