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It was my hobby in those early Fleet Street days to explore the underworld of London and to get behind the scenes of its monstrous puppet show. I sought out the queer characters not yet “standardized” by the discipline of compulsory education or the conventions of middle-class manners.

I dived into the foreign quarters of London and found that most nations of Europe, and the races of the East, had their special sanctuaries in the great old city, in which they preserved their own speech and habits and faith.

In the Russian quarter I met victims of the tyranny of Czardom, who had escaped from Siberian prisons and still bore the marks of their chains and lashes; and the Russian Jews, too, who had come to England to save themselves from the pogroms of Riga and other cities. I found many of them working as tailors and seamstresses in back rooms of tenement houses, Whitechapel way, abominably overcrowded, but earning high wages. It was a revelation to me that they did most of the “black” work for great West End firms, so that Mayfair received its garments from the East End, with any diseases that might be carried with them from those fœtid little factories. Thousands of them were employed in cigarette factories, and spent their days filling little spills of paper with the yellow weed, incredibly fast. According to the tradition of not muzzling the ox that treads the corn, they were allowed to smoke as much as they liked, and both men and women smoked continually.