er from poverty and all the evils and injustices that followed in
its train.

As my appointed time drew near my sleep was much broken; and sometimes
in the middle of the night, when I heard a solitary footstep going down
the street I would get up, draw aside one of my blinds, and see a light
burning in some bedroom window opposite, and afterwards hear the muffled
cry of the small new being who had come as another immigrant into our
chill little world.

But I made no arrangements for myself until my Welsh landlady came up to
my room one day and asked if I had settled with a doctor. When I
answered no, she held up her hands and cried:

"Good gracious! Just as I thought. Thee'st got to lose no time, though."

Happily there was a doctor in our street nearly every day, and if I
wished it she would call him up to me. I agreed and the doctor came next
morning.

He was a tall, elderly man with cold eyes, compressed lips, and a sour
expression, and neither his manner nor his speech gave any hint of a
consciousness (which I am sure every true doctor must have) that in
coming to a woman in my condition he was entering one of the sacred
chambers of human life.

He asked me a few abrupt questions, told me when he would come again,
and then spoke about his fee.

"My fee is a guinea and I usually get it in advance," he said, whereupon
I went to my drawer, and took out a sovereign and a shilling, not
without a certain pang at seeing so much go in a moment after I had been
saving so long.

The doctor had dropped the money into his waistcoat pocket with oh! such
a casual air, and was turning to go, when my Welsh landlady said:

"Her's not doing herself justice in the matter, of food, doctor."

"Why, what do you eat?" asked the doctor, and as well as I could, out of
my dry and parched throat, I told him.

"Tut! tut! This will never do," he said. "It's your duty to your child
to have better food than that. Something light and nourishing every day,
such as poultry, fish, chicken broth, beef-tea, and farinaceous foods
generally."

I gasped. 'What was the doctor thinking about?

"Remember," he said, with his finger up, "the health of the child is
intimately dependent on the health of the mother. When the mother is in
a morbid state it affects the composition of the blood, and does great
harm to the health of the offspring, both immediately and in after life.
Don't forget now. Good day!"

That was a terrible shock to me. In m