He sat in a Windsor arm-chair in a very small kitchen; a window at his back revealed that abomination of desolation, a Bethnal Green backyard.

He sat as he had sat for years, bent and doubled up, for some kind of paralysis had overtaken him.
He had a fine head and a pointed beard, his thin and weak neck seemed hardly able to bear its heavy burden.

He was not overclean, and his clothes were, to say the least, shabby.

But there he sat, his wife at work to maintain him.

We stood, for there was no sitting room for us.
Grime, misery and poverty were in evidence.
He told us that his forefathers were Huguenots, who fled from France and settled as silk weavers in Spitalfields.