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At length, when he got to the wide square fronting the Royal Exchange, the solitariness of the place struck him with a strange chill. All the great buildings closed and deserted; not a habitable-looking house anywhere. But there were numbers of people passing along the thoroughfares–mostly groups of young men of about two-and-twenty, tallow-faced, round-shouldered, wearing over-coats and billycock hats, and smoking short pipes; and there were crowded omnibuses coming rolling along (what a difference was this roar and rabble from the quiet of the Sabbath morning far away there on the northern coast!), and these people must live somewhere. So again he contentedly trudged on; down King William Street; over the bridge spanning the misty river; along the Borough Road; until he arrived at Union Street. He had so far failed in his quest for lodgings; but in Union Street he espied a coffee-house; and as he had become both tired and hungry, he entered the dingy little place, sat down, and ordered a cup of coffee and a roll and butter.

It was a kind of shelter, after all; though everything was dreadfully dirty, and there was a heavy odour in the place. The waiter brought him a greasy newspaper; but he put it aside. Then came his breakfast. The butter was not touchable; but he reflected that it was a luxury which he, living on another man’s money, had had no right to order. When he had paid back the 5 pounds, he would consider the question of butter–though not butter such as this. He ate the dry roll, and managed to swallow the strangely-tasting coffee; then he fell asleep; and was eventually wakened by the ringing of church bells.

So, having paid his shot, he wandered out again into the pale and misty sunlight; and as he had been struck by the appearance of St. Saviour’s in crossing the bridge, he strolled back thither, and entered the church, and sat down in a pew. He remained through the earlier part of the service; but when the sermon began, he left. The streets were now quite busy, though the shops were closed. It was not like Sunday on the shores of the Firth of Clyde.

‘In any case,’ he was thinking, ‘it can be no great breaking of the Sabbath that a man should provide himself with a lodging to cover his head.’

Eventually, after much patient wandering and inquiring, he found a house in the Southwark-bridge Road–he was attracted to it by the presence of one or two flower-boxes on the window-sills–where he was offered a small, fairly neat and clean bedroom for the sum of three-and-sixpence per week. Thereupon the bargain was closed; and John Douglas found himself established at least with headquarters, from whence he could issue to fight his battle with the great forces of London.

Well, day after day–nay, week after week–passed, and all his efforts to obtain employment, had resulted in nothing. It was not through any shame-facedness or fastidiousness or false pride. He was ready to do anything. Many people thought this man a maniac, who calmly walked in and offered, in his slow, methodic Scotch speech, to copy letters for them, or do anything that could be pointed out to him, confessing, on interrogation, that he had been in no employment before, and could therefore produce no testimonials as to character or fitness. On his own showing, there was nothing special he could do; though he had bought a little treatise on book-keeping, and occasionally studied it in the evenings. As he walked about the streets and observed how all the people around him seemed to be fully occupied, and busy and contented, it occurred to him as strange that they should all have fallen into these grooves so naturally. He looked at the clerk giving out tickets at a railway station, and thought, he could do that also. Perhaps the business of the young men who every morning were to be seen inside the big windows of the drapers’ shops in the Borough Road, decorating the place with ribbons and gowns, demanded a special knowledge that he had not acquired; but it could not be difficult, for example, to be a policeman? They seemed happy enough; good-natured; sometimes even with a word of chaff for the costermonger whom they ordered to move on, him and his barrow.