any than in England, and as meat and groceries
are decidedly dearer, it is plain that the working man cannot live in
clover. Doctor Shadwell gives an example of a smith earning 1050
marks, and having to pay 280 for rent. He had a wife and two children,
and Doctor Shadwell reckoned that the family to make two ends meet
must live on 37 pf. per head per day; the prison scale per head being
80 pf. I know a respectable German charwoman who earns 41 marks a
month, and pays 25 marks a month for her parterre flat in the _Hof_.
She lets off all her rooms except the kitchen, and she sleeps in a
place that is only fit for a coal-hole. A work-girl pays her 6 marks a
month for a clean tidy bedroom furnished with a solid wooden bedstead,
a chest of drawers, a sofa, and a table. This girl works from 7.30 to
6 in a shop, she pays the charwoman 10 pf. for her breakfast, 10 pf.
weekly for her lamp, and another 10 pf. for the use and comfort of the
kitchen fire at night. Her dinner of soup, meat, and vegetables the
girl gets at a _Privatkueche_ for 40 pf. So the workgirl's weekly
expenses for food, fire, and lodging are 5 marks 20 pf., but this does
not give her an evening meal or afternoon coffee. The charwoman
reckoned that she herself only had 15 marks a month for food, fire,
light, and clothes; but she got nearly all her food with the families
for whom she worked. She was a cheerful, honest body, and though she
slept in a coal-hole was apparently quite healthy. She looked forward
to her old age with tranquillity, because before long she would be in
receipt of a pension from the State, a weekly sum that with her habits
of thrift and industry would enable her to live.

A German lady who chooses to teach in a _Volksschule_, because she
thinks the _Volk_ more interesting than Higher Daughters, described a
home to me from which one of her pupils came. The parents had eight
children, and the family of ten lived in two rooms. That is a state of
things we can match in England, unhappily. But my friend described
this home, not on account of its misery, but for the extraordinary
neatness and comfort the mother maintained in it. "Every time I go
there," said my friend, who lived with her father and sister in a
charming flat,--"every time I go there I say to the woman, if only it
looked like this in my home"; and there was no need for me to see the
rooms to understand what she meant; for I know the air of order and
even of solidity with which the