I never knew why at his time of life he had not risen to a better position.  He used to say that “things had been against him,” and I had no right to seek for further explanations.  He was married, and had had three children, of whom one only was living—­a boy of ten years old, whom he hoped to get into the public-house as a potboy for a beginning.  Like Taylor, the world had well-nigh overpowered John entirely—­ crushed him out of all shape, so that what he was originally, or might have been, it was almost impossible to tell.  There was no particular character left in him.  He may once have been this or that, but every angle now was knocked off, as it is knocked off from the rounded pebbles which for ages have been dragged up and down the beach by the waves.  For a lifetime he had been exposed to all sorts of whims and caprices, generally speaking of the most unreasonable kind, and he had become so trained to take everything without remonstrance or murmuring that every cross in his life came to him as a chop alleged by an irritated customer to be raw or done to a cinder.  Poor wretch! he had one trouble, however, which he could not accept with such equanimity, or rather with such indifference.  His wife was a drunkard.  This was an awful trial to him.  The worst consequence was that his boy knew that his mother got drunk.  The neighbours kindly enough volunteered to look after the little man when he was not at school, and they waylaid him and gave him dinner when his mother was intoxicated; but frequently he was the first when he returned to find out that there was nothing for him to eat, and many a time he got up at night as late as twelve o’clock, crawled downstairs, and went off to his father to tell him that “she was very bad, and he could not go to sleep.”  The father, then, had to keep his son in the Strand till it was time to close, take him back, and manage in the best way he could.  Over and over again was he obliged to sit by this wretched woman’s bedside till breakfast time, and then had to go to work as usual.  Let anybody who has seen a case of this kind say whether the State ought not to provide for the relief of such men as John, and whether he ought not to have been able to send his wife away to some institution where she might have been tended and restrained from destroying, not merely herself, but her husband and her child.  John hardly bore up under this sorrow.  A man may endure much, provided he knows that he will be well supported when his day’s toil is over; but if the help for which he looks fails, he falls.  Oh those weary days in that dark back dining-room, from which not a square inch of sky was visible! weary days haunted by a fear that while he was there unknown mischief was being done! weary days, whose close nevertheless he dreaded!  Beaten down, baffled, disappointed, if we are in tolerable health we can contrive to live on some almost impossible chance, some most distant flicker of hope.  It is astonishing how minute a crack in the heavy uniform