Lennard was inclined to be sentimental and romantic. "What adventures," said he, "we should hear if the corpses in that dissecting-room over yonder could tell their histories! Unclaimed all of them! Think what that means. How low one must sink when nobody comes forward to ask the parish to bury you at its own expense! Let me conjure up a history for you of the seven subjects on the tables where we have been at work to-day. I will begin at my own, where I am 'doing my leg.'"
"Ah! I am glad you said 'doing.' I should have demurred to 'dissecting,' had you said that," threw in Murphy.
Disregarding the interruption, Lennard went on: "This old man--not so very old, about sixty I should say--has good features and toil-worn hands; was, let us say, an unfrocked parson: fell into bad ways, family disowned him; left his old associates, or they left him; gradually sank lower and lower; sold little things in the street; lived at threepenny lodging-houses; got ill; taken into the parish infirmary; died, and came here. Think of all he must have gone through! How he would remember his happy youth at school, at Oxford, his ordination, his good aspirations, the society he mixed in, and the remorse that embittered his life. This sort of thing is common enough. That woman on the next table, with the spinal fracture, a tight-rope dancer in her early days; used to delight the habitués of Old Vauxhall; one night fell and broke her back. Folk soon got tired of helping her. Her husband made her happy, and was good to her; till, in old age, he died, and she was left bedridden and without means. Even the church folk got tired of the case. She went into the workhouse, died, and so came here. All this as likely as not. Think of those long years of suffering! From the last dazzling lights and gaiety of Vauxhall, to the gradually beworsening room where she lay a cripple for so many years, while her husband did his best to cheer her, and make her as easy as he could. Behind her is a coloured woman not more than forty. How came she here? A stranger from beyond the seas, knowing nothing of our language, brought here by friends who held out hopes of gain and pleasure, and then left her sick and dying in St. George's Workhouse, down by the London Docks."