Please don't remember it as you go to bed; if you are as soft as you ought to be you may not rest so well as usual.

But for old men of sixty, seventy, and eighty, ill-fed, with neither meat nor blood, to greet the dawn unrefreshed, and to stagger through the day in mad search for crusts, with relentless night rushing down upon them again, and to do this five nights and days--O dear, soft people, full of meat and blood, how can you ever understand?
I walked up Mile End Road between the Carter and the Carpenter.

Mile End Road is a wide thoroughfare, cutting the heart of East London, and there were tens of thousands of people abroad on it.

I tell you this so that you may fully appreciate what I shall describe in the next paragraph.

As I say, we walked along, and when they grew bitter and cursed the land, I cursed with them, cursed as an American waif would curse, stranded in a strange and terrible land.