With eager steps, droughty throats and keen desire they seek the wine cup yet again.
Now come fellows, young and middle-aged, who dare not be seen by day, for whom the police hold "warrants," for they have absconded from wives and children, leaving them chargeable to the parish.
Here are men who have robbed their employers, here young people of both sexes who have drained Circe's cup and broken their parents' hearts.
Surely it is a strange and heterogeneous procession that issues evening by evening from the caves and dens of London's underworld.

But notice there is also a returning procession! For as the sun sinks to rest, sad-faced men seek some cover where they may lie down and rest their weary bones; where perchance they may sleep and regain some degree of passive courage that will enable them, at the first streak of morning light, to rise and begin again a disheartening round of tramp, tramp, searching for work that is everlastingly denied them.

Hungry and footsore, their souls fainting within them, they seek the homes where wives and children await their return with patient but hopeless resignation.
Take notice if you will of the places they enter, for surely the beautiful word "home" is desecrated if applied to most of their habitations.

Horrid places within and without, back to back and face to face they stand.
At their doorway death stands ready to strike.

In the murky light of little rooms filled with thick air child-life has struggled into existence; up and down their narrow stairs patient endurance and passive hopelessness ever pass and repass.
Small wonder that the filthy waters of a neighbouring canal woo and receive so many broken hearts and emaciated bodies.
But the procession now changes its sex, for weary widowed women are returning to children who for many hours have been lacking a mother's care, for mothers in the underworld must work if children must eat.
So the weary widows have been at the wash-tubs all day long, and are coming home with two shillings hardly earned.