ough little Margaret it
was that those greatest of all Canadianising influences, the school
and the mission, made their impact upon the hearts and the home of
the Ketzel family. And as time went on it came to pass that from the
Ketzel home, clean, orderly, and Canadian, there went out into the
foul wastes about, streams of healing and cleansing that did their
beneficent work where they went.

One of these streams reached the home of Paulina, to the great
good of herself and her family. Here, again, it was chiefly little
Margaret who became the channel of the new life, for with Paulina
both Simon and Lena had utterly failed. She was too dull, too
apathetic, too hopeless and too suspicious even of her own kind to
allow the Ketzels an entrance to her heart. But even had she not
been all this, she was too sorely oppressed with the burden of her
daily toil to yield to such influence as they had to offer. For
Rosenblatt was again in charge of her household. In a manner best
known to himself, he had secured the mortgage on her home, and thus
became her landlord, renting her the room in which she and her
family dwelt, and for which they all paid in daily labour, and
dearly enough. Rosenblatt, thus being her master, would not let her
go. She was too valuable for that. Strong, patient, diligent, from
early dawn till late at night she toiled and moiled with her baking
and scrubbing, fighting out that ancient and primitive and endless
fight against dirt and hunger, beaten by the one, but triumphing
over the other. She carried in her heart a dull sense of injustice,
a feeling that somehow wrong was being done her; but when Rosenblatt
flourished before her a formidable legal document, and had the same
interpreted to her by his smart young clerk, Samuel Sprink, she,
with true Slavic and fatalistic passivity, accepted her lot and bent
her strong back to her burden without complaint. What was the use of
complaint? Who in all the city was there to care for a poor, stupid,
Galician woman with none too savoury a reputation? Many and generous
were the philanthropies of Winnipeg, but as yet there was none that
had to do with the dirt, disease and degradation that were too often
found in the environment of the foreign people. There were many
churches in the city rich in good work, with many committees that
met to confer and report, but there was not yet one whose special
duty it was to confer and to report upon the unhappy and struggling
an