as he handed the wreckage to its weeping owner, was greeted by an indignant welcome from the presiding sister, in whose judgment the drenched and forlorn condition of his little person was the most serious dilemma.

It was not worth the risk of being washed out to sea, or the chance of rheumatic fever, or the spoiling of his velveteens.

If his mother had been there she would certainly have added, "There, what can you expect of a sevenmonths'?'

But we knew better.

'I was playing it was a baby,' whispered Earn. 'I heard it cry.'

And what is to come of it all? Will the authorities be equal to the educational problem? Or must philosopher, scholar, romanticist, smother in the Gutter that gave them birth?

II

THE DEVELOPMENT OF JOHNNY

At this time the whole planet seemed set in its place among the worlds and fitted up for one great purpose- the making of my Johnny. This small life seemed to have become a centre of crystallization in the world of matter, hungrily assimilating its environment in the effort to focus its own character. Johnny's development was a procession of transitory moods, up-hill and down, through rain and sunshine. He was very good, and the magnetic touch of his friendly little hand in mine, and the infectious music of his merry laugh, could lift one in a golden moment to the third heaven; but the descent was as certain as sudden, and behold! there was not one virtue in him. A torrent of filthy and abusive eloquence, a genius for inventive lies, a furious and bitterly resentful temper, were all components of the remarkable spirit-demon which at

times possessed him, and kept the scale of my Johnny's soul-development well in the balance of retrogression. The bright moments of his baby life, which grew briefer, although ever more precious, as his little body waxed stronger, were the lurid signals of some terrific and explosive exhibition.

He could sit patiently dreaming in the pauper pew on Sunday evenings, with visionary eyes wandering among the flowers and the altar-lights; he would even sing a hymn, sometimes, in a soft and gentle treble, when the tune caught his ear, and the words found some responsive nucleus in the ideation centres of his clouded brain. But the halo would not fit the appalling revelation of Monday morning.

'Johnny must n't go ter meetin' any more,' he decided at last. "Teacher sez yer sh'd jes see 'ow orful 'e is next dy!'

He never had any apology for these occasions. Oi jis goes mad an' as the 'eadache somethink crool!' he would say.

Several stormy years of our friendship were slipping by amid mirth and tears, and still the index of Johnny's mind read reversion to type, -Johnny was not a gentleman.

One had started out as the pioneer of his education with such grand and heroic ideas, under a sky of starry promise. He was to exist in spite of his environment, not in any sort of correspondence with it. He was to be a gentleman of the slums, a Gutter-boy in rags, with the motto 'noblesse oblige' written all over his young heart.

And here we were left without any ennobling result from our foolish aspirations, with the problem of human reconstruction still staring at us. One had fallen so low as to tolerate the thought of starting with the conversion of the external, in the dim hope of

persuading one's self that beauty of form is the expression of progress.

'Johnny, if I make you look like a gentleman, could you possibly pretend to be one?'

The proposal was very acceptable to Johnny.

Was there ever a great personality which did not love to pose? Man is fickle even to the ego that he adores, and loves to turn his back on it at times till its crying need recalls him.

A little money and a pawn-shop did the rest, and my Johnny resuscitated the age of the dandies. He went into the dim recess behind the rows of swinging garments a picturesque, ruddy-cheeked Gutter-baby, happy and eager, a bit cleaner than usual. He came out a wretched little snob, with his head riveted in a wide collar, his feet moving heavily in stiff hob-nailed instruments of torture, and an orangestriped cap on the most hairy point of his skull.

'Will I do? Please, I've come!' he said with a horrible leer. At least the spectacle of his vanity justified the expenditure. He tweaked and twisted his small body into extraordinary contortions, to view as much of it as possible from every conceivable angle; he strolled proudly about with his elbows out; he twirled an imaginary cane, and buttoned and unbuttoned his coat a dozen times a minute.

'Ain't it all roight!' he appealed to me at intervals, and never knew he was breaking my heart.

How could I take him home to his mother like this and hear her say, 'Well, 'ee do look a treat!'

On the way we were mercifully relieved of one article: a yellow cat was soliloquizing loudly on somebody's roof as we passed, and Johnny, yielding to the only natural impulse, sent the orange-streaked cap flying into a tree, where it stuck forlornly for many

days, until every trace of the gaudy ornamentation had disappeared. A little farther on, his collar burst as he was stooping over a puddle to catch a glimpse of his own loveliness. Already he began to look a little more like himself.

For many hours he walked sedately about, the cynosure of every eye, but it was a difficult part for him to keep up. Toward evening I lost sight of him, and went out later in search of him, to know the latest development. The sky was alive with stars, set like jewels in a velvet pall, and the moonlight poured down on a scene that does not know the meaning of the hush of night. Like eerie shadows, a group of grimy imps, half-clad, and wild with the joy of their play, were darting here and there in the distance, and one, grimier and more ragged than the rest, came to me in a torn shirt, with one trouser-leg ripped up, carrying his boots in his hand.

'I've jes tiked me gentleman-clothes off fer er little rest!' he explained apologetically.

Three days later, there was nothing left of the masquerade but a little gray bundle in the pawn-shop, and a crumpled ticket safely stowed away in the heel of a forsaken stocking.

The boots, it is true, lingered for a little while longer, but at last they, too, went home, and I forgot to miss them till one day a few pence in a hot little hand raised in my mind a cruel suspicion that my Johnny was not a man to be trusted.

'Johnny,' I cried, thrilled with horror, 'where did you get that money from?'

He amused himself for some time playing with my worst fears and exciting me beyond endurance.

At first he almost confessed that he had 'pinched' it, but he could n't remember where. Then he declared he

had 'earned it honest,' and told a long confused story about it, full of incident; but he could n't quite finish it, and the pennies had still to be accounted for. At last, having reduced me to a fever of misery, he said condescendingly, 'Cum out of it, thin, oi'll show yer!'

We walked on in silence till our pilgrimage ended abruptly at the corner of the street. There, under three dusty golden balls, swung sadly a little pair of lonely boots.

Johnny pointed to them solemnly, and there was a convincing ring of proprietorship in his voice, - 'Thim's mine!'

It was the end of a tremendous failure, and the experience had been a sharp lesson in the methods of evolution. But as I looked into his big impudent eyes and answered the wide smile of self-satisfaction that I found there, I felt just a little less despondent than usual about the development of my Johnny.

To him it had been all a very good joke, and he could afford to be kind.

'Oi wus only 'avin a game with yer!' he said, and encircled me with loving arms, rubbing a little rough head tenderly against my hand. 'But were n't it a bloody shame ter worrit yer, though?'

III

THE GUTTER PARSON

Sometimes, and especially at certain seasons of the year, or when the family fortunes seem to encourage self-advertisement and ceremonial, it happens even among the pagan Gutter-folk that the young people are seized with the desire to have a show. Then there is a tremendous gathering of the Gutter, and a rainbow shower of confetti round the church, and presently a blushing, shame-faced boy in a miserably new

outfit, and a bold-eyed gorgeous bride, with, perhaps, even in her escort one or two Gutter-babies, oddly disguised in feathers and ribbons.

Easter morning is a favorite occasion for this sort of pantomime, and is of course exceptionally inconvenient to the ecclesiastical authorities.

Our 'Loo' was going to marry Bill Smith like this.

It seemed to Loo that morning that the Easter sun shone as if it ‘never 'ad before.' She and her sisters had been up all night, stitching beads into a pattern on her satin train, but in spite of this she was as fresh as a peach now. The vigorous youth of the Gutter only collapses under the severe and prolonged strain of matrimonial experience and the keeping of the home together, and struggles with fierce contempt against the shock of circumstances and the crushing brutality of over-work and irregular hours.

Although Loo had been reared on bread and dripping and weak tea-dust, with one magnificent dinner, once a week, on Sunday, Bill was justified this morning in his boastful pride of her brilliant muscular beauty. But in less than two years, the memory of this vision of splendid humanity will be over. Loo will be wondering what there is to live for, long before then; she will be a wasptongued, ill-tempered gossip, looking out at Gutter-garten with haggard, disappointed eyes, a gaunt and weary woman, with her girlhood crushed under the flood of pain and misery which Bill's wife must meet.

The outlook of the young people was not so surprisingly hopeful. There was just enough to eat at home, as indeed there always had been, but Bill had unfortunately managed to lose his work a few days before the wedding.

However, it was unlucky to put things off, and besides Loo had a tremendous bet that she would have her

Here is a curious phenomenon of nature, a gentleman and a scholar, who for some reason or other has chosen to associate himself with the pain and poverty, the reeking squalor, the sin and devilry of the Gutter. It almost persuades the Man in the Gutter to believe sometimes in the genuineness of his attitude. Though, of course, he does try to kid them now and then! There was Johnny's mother, for instance, who asked for milk when the baby was choking with the whooping-cough last winter, and the Gutter Parson just looked at her and said,

'My good woman, am I a cow?'

'Of course 'ee were n't no cow, but babies want milk, and wot are parsons paid fer!'

For the Man in the Gutter is conscious only of a body that gets hungry and hurts, and a soul that is capable of bitter hatred and the sting of fear.

Yet the Gutter Parson can hold his own with the heart of the Gutter. I have seen him in the suffocating atmosphere of the Mission hall, through the thick clouds of foul tobacco-smoke, perched on his little platform before a wild mass of the darkest humanity of London, gathered together by the bribery of a 'pipe and a bellyful,' a small and not imposing figure, with a curly head and a boyish smile that the years had never been able to steal from us, an unconscious and magnificent display of leadership, as with one weak hand lifted from time to time against that vast and powerful throng he controlled. and restrained and silenced their fierce. emotions at his will.

The Gutter Parson is dead. We killed him in his own Gutter with our importunity and our hopelessness and our peculiar ingratitude. But we could not bury him.

Last Good Friday, old widow Judy, reputed by an ancient tradition of the Gutter-babies to be a spy in the pay of

the police, heard the thin treble of a familiar hymn-tune through the confused tumult of the holiday-making street, and rose up in her warm corner of the Blue Star, where she sat with her pipe and glass sheltering from the east wind, and picking up scraps of gossip. Straining her own drunken voice to that faint echo, she began a dizzy perilous dance which landed her out into the Gutter, with her mocking words and her evil, mocking gestures, just as the procession from the Mission headed by the great crucifix, in the hard strong hands of a huge navvy in corduroys, with the dust and odor of his labor still upon him, came round the corner.

A few holiday-makers stopped to laugh, a small acolyte put out his arm to push her aside. But between Judy and that stalwart crucifer swept some swift and silent warning. Suddenly flinging up her hands, with a loud, unearthly yell, the old creature fell forward, her face livid in the waving torch-light as the procession filed solemnly past her.

'Oh, my Gawd,' she moaned, 'did yer see 'im there plain as daylight? And me drunk agin!'

And now before his ungentle discipline this wedding party crept silently away in their shame and confusion, leaving behind them a sensation of strange calm and stillness.

Outside, every one took a different view of things; the sun was still warm and bright, and Bill revived a little in the fresh air. No one felt inclined to be really serious or miserable, so they decided to continue the festivities as if there had been no interrupting catastrophe in the programme.

Later on, when Bill and Loo were visited in their new home, they had agreed not to 'bother about no parsons now.'