ond quality........0 8 1/2
Four pails of water................0 2
Lard or dripping (butter being out of the question)0 5
Coarse salt....................0 0 3/4
A bushel of charcoal...............0 4
A quart of dried vegetables............0 3
Three quarts of potatoes..............0 2
Dips........................0 3 1/4
Thread and needles.................0 2 1/2
______
2 7

To save charcoal, Mother Bunch prepared soup only two or three times a
week at most, on a stove that stood on the landing of the fourth story.
On other days she ate it cold. There remained nine or ten pence a week
for clothes and lodging. By rare good fortune, her situation was in one
respect an exception to the lot of many others. Agricola, that he
might not wound her delicacy, had come to a secret arrangement with the
housekeeper, and hired a garret for her, just large enough to hold a
small bed, a chair, and a table; for which the sempstress had to pay
five shillings a year. But Agricola, in fulfilment of his agreement with
the porter, paid the balance, to make up the actual rent of the
garret, which was twelve and sixpence. The poor girl had thus about
eighteenpence a month left for her other expenses. But many workwomen,
whose position is less fortunate than hers, since they have neither
home nor family, buy a piece of bread and some other food to keep them
through the day; and at night patronize the "twopenny rope," one with
another, in a wretched room containing five or six beds, some of which
are always engaged by men, as male lodgers are by far the most abundant.
Yes; and in spite of the disgust that a poor and virtuous girl must feel
at this arrangement, she must submit to it; for a lodging-house keeper
cannot have separate rooms for females. To furnish a room, however
meanly, the poor workwoman must possess three or four shillings in ready
money. But how save this sum, out of weekly earnings of a couple of
florins, which are scarcely sufficient to keep her from starving, and
are still less sufficient to clothe her? No! no! The poor wretch must
resign herself to this repugnant cohabitation; and so, gradually, the
instinct of modesty becomes weakened; the natural sentiment of chastity,
that saved her from the "gay life," becomes extinct; vice appears to be
the only means of improving her intolerable con