I--with several others--had
been helping Campion with his annual outing of factory girls and young
hooligans. The weather, which had been perfect on Saturday, Sunday, and
when we had started, a gay and astonishing army, at seven o'clock, had
broken before ten. It had rained, dully miserable, insistently all day
long. The happy day in the New Forest had been a damp and dismal fiasco.
I was returning home, thinking I might walk off an incipient chill,
as depressed as no one but the baffled philanthropist can be, when
I perceived a tattered and dejected man sitting on a bench, a
clothes-basket between his feet, his elbows on his knees, his head in
his hands, and sobbing as if his heart would break. As the spectacle
of a grown-up man crying bitterly in a public thoroughfare was somewhat
remarkable, I paused, and then in order to see whether his distress was
genuine, and also not to arouse his suspicions, I threw myself in an
exhausted manner on the bench beside him. He continued to sob. At last I
said, raising my voice:
"You seem to be pretty miserable.
Pages:
448
449
450
451
452
453
454
455
456
457
458
459
460
461
462
463
464
465
466
467
468
469
470
471
472