People who were suffering from nothing but slow starvation
would come to him for medical aid. One scene above all was burnt into
his memory: a sick girl in a wretched garret, the boy visitor saying
as gently as he could that her sole need was better food, and the
sister of the starved child who turned upon him with a kind of choking
passion, and, pulling from her pocket a few pence and half-pence and
holding them out, cried: "That is all I get for six-and-thirty hours'
work, and you talk about giving her proper food."
When, after a full year, he left Rotherhithe for the north of London,
to be apprenticed--as his elder brother, James, had already been
apprenticed--to his other medical brother-in-law, Dr. Scott, he saw
more of this teeming, squalid life in the filthy courts and alleys
through which he used to pass on his way to the library of the College
of Surgeons.
What, in later life, he tried to do to better this state of things
was not the usual philanthropic work, but the endeavour to
bring intellectual light to the ignorant toilers, to strip away
make-believe, and provide some machinery by which to catch and utilize
capacity.
Great was the change from the surroundings of Rotherhithe to the home
atmosphere of the Scotts. He was now with his favourite sister Eliza,
his senior by twelve years, who was a second mother to him.
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