The three live together and pool their earnings; they occupy two very small rooms, for which they pay five shillings weekly.
After paying twopence each to avoid parish funerals, they have five shillings left weekly for food, firing, clothing and charity.

Question them, and you will learn how they expend those five shillings.

"How much butter do you allow yourselves during the week ?" The widow answers: "Two ounces of shilling butter once a week." "Yes, mother," says the invalid, "on a Saturday." She knew the day of the week and the hour too, when her eyes brightened at the sight of three-halfpenny worth of butter.
Truly they fared sumptuously on the Sabbath, for they tasted "shilling butter." But they refuse to die, and I have not yet discovered the point at which life ebbs out for lack of food, for when underworld folk die of starvation we are comforted by the assurance that they died "from natural causes." I suppose that if the four children all over eight years of age, belonging to a widow machinist well known to me, had died, their death would have been attributed to "natural causes." She had dined them upon one pennyworth of stewed tapioca without either sugar or milk.

Sometimes the children had returned to school without even that insult to their craving stomachs.

But "natural causes" is the euphonious name given by intelligent juries to starvation, when inquests are held in the underworld.