After listening to an extended homily, with a general assent and tobacco’s phlegm, Gower replied to his father’s ‘You starved manfully?’ nodding:  ’From Baden to Nancy.  An Alsatian cottager at times helped me along, milk and bread.’

‘Wholesome for body and for soul.’

’Entering Nancy I subscribed to the dictum of our first fathers, which dogs would deliver, if they could speak:  that there is no driver like stomach:  and I went head on to the College, saw the Principal:  plea of urgency.  No engagement possible, to teach either French or English.  But he was inquisitive touching the urgency.  That was my chance.  The French are humane when they are not suspicious of you.  They are generous, if you put a light to their minds.  As I was dealing with a scholarly one, I made use of such ornamental literary skill as I possessed, to prove urgency.  He supplied me with bread, fruit, and wine.  In the end he procured me pupils.  I lodged over a baker’s shop.  I had food walks, and learnt something of forestry there—­a taking study.  When I had saved enough to tramp it home, I said my adieux to that good friend and tramped away, entering London with about the same amount in small coin as when I entered Nancy.  A manner of exactly hitting the mark, that some would not find so satisfactory as it is to me.’

The minister sighed.  ’There comes in the “philosophy,” I suppose.  When will you understand, that this “philosophy” is only the passive of a religious faith?  It seems to suit you gentlemen of the road while you are young.  Work among the Whitechapel poor.  It would be a way for discovering the shallows of your “philosophy” earlier.’

Gower asked him:  ‘Going badly here, sir?’

’Murders, robberies, misusage of women, and misconduct of women!—­Drink, in short:  about the same amount.  Drink is their death’s river, rolling them on helpless as corpses, on to—­may they find mercy!  I and a few stand—­it’s in the tide we stand here, to stop them, pluck them out, make life a bit sweet to them before the poor bodies go beneath.  But come! all’s not dark, we have our gleams.  I speak distressed by one of our girls:  a good girl, I believe; and the wilfullest that ever had command of her legs.  A well-favoured girl!  You’ll laugh, she has given her heart to a prize-fighter.  Well, you can say, she might have chosen worse.  He drinks, she hates it; she loves the man and hates his vice.  He swears amendment, is hiccupping at night; fights a match on the morrow, and gets beaten out of formation.  No matter:  whenever, wherever, that man goes to his fight, that girl follows to nurse him after it.  He’s her hero.  Women will have one, and it’s their lottery.  You read of such things; here we have it alive and walking.  I am led to think they ’re an honest couple.  They come of established families.  Her mother was out of Caermarthen; died under my ministration, saintly, forgiving the drunkard.  You may remember the greengrocer, Tobias Winch?  He passed away in shrieks for one drop.  I had to pitch my voice to the top notes to get hearing for the hymn.  He was a reverent man, with the craving by fits.  That should have been a lesson to Madge.’