Grief too, yet at the misfortune of others, for I have had few properly my own; so much the worse, for in that case I might have said or done somewhat, but here was powerless.

Oh, Tom, trouble not thyself about sympathy; thou hast two stout legs and young, wherefore need a staff?

Furthermore, it is twenty minutes past two, and time to go to bed.

Buchlein, it will be long before my secretiveness remains so quiet again; make the most of what thou hast got.

CHAPTER 1.2.

1841-1846.

[The migration to Rotherhithe, noted under date of January 9, 1841, was a fresh step in his career.  In 1839 both his sisters married, and both married doctors.  Dr. Cooke, the husband of the elder sister, who was settled in Coventry, had begun to give him some instruction in the principles of medicine as early as the preceding June.  It was now arranged that he should go as assistant to Mr. Chandler, of Rotherhithe, a practical preliminary to walking the hospitals and obtaining a medical degree in London.  His experiences among the poor in the dock region of the East of London—­for Dr. Chandler had charge of the parish—­supplied him with a grim commentary on his diligent reading in Carlyle.  Looking back on this period, he writes:—­]

The last recorded speech of Professor Teufelsdrockh proposes the toast ‘Die Sache der Armen in Gottes und Teufelsnamen’ (The cause of the Poor in Heaven’s name and —­’s.) The cause of the Poor is the burden of “Past and Present,” “Chartism,” and “Latter-Day Pamphlets.”  To me...this advocacy of the cause of the poor appealed very strongly...because...I had had the opportunity of seeing for myself something of the way the poor live.  Not much, indeed, but still enough to give a terrible foundation of real knowledge to my speculations.

[After telling how he came to know something of the East End, he proceeds:—­]

I saw strange things there—­among the rest, people who came to me for medical aid, and who were really suffering from nothing but slow starvation.  I have not forgotten—­am not likely to forget so long as memory holds—­a visit to a sick girl in a wretched garret where two or three other women, one a deformed woman, sister of my patient, were busy shirt-making.  After due examination, even my small medical knowledge sufficed to show that my patient was merely in want of some better food than the bread and bad tea on which these people were living.  I said so as gently as I could, and the sister turned upon me with a kind of choking passion.  Pulling out of her pocket a few pence and halfpence, and holding them out, “That is all I get for six and thirty hours’ work, and you talk about giving her proper food.”