se after house, street after street,
we tried, and at every door with "Apartments to Let" over it where we
knocked the same hateful landlady-face appeared with the same triumphant
gleam in the fish-eyes and the same smile on the mouth that opened to
tell us delightedly that she and the town were "full up"; that never had
there been known such a rush of visitors; applicants were being turned
away every hour from every door!

After three miserable hours spent in this way we began inquiring at all
the shops, and eventually at one were told of a poor woman in a small
house in a street a good way back from the front who would perhaps be
able to taken us in. To this place we went and knocked at a low door in
a long blank wall in a narrow street; it was opened to us by a pale
thin sad-looking woman in a rusty black gown, who asked us into a shabby
parlour, and agreed to take us in until we could find something better.
She had a gentle voice and was full of sympathy, and seeing our plight
took us into the kitchen behind the parlour, which was living- and
working-room as well, to dry ourselves by the fire.

"The greatest pleasure in life," said once a magnificent young athlete,
a great pedestrian, to me, "is to rest when you are tired." And, I
should add, to dry and warm yourself by a big fire when wet and
cold, and to eat and drink when you are hungry and thirsty. All these
pleasures were now ours, for very soon tea and chops were ready for us;
and so strangely human, so sister-like did this quiet helpful woman
seem after our harsh experiences on that rough rainy day--that we
congratulated ourselves on our good fortune in having found such a
haven, and soon informed her that we wanted no "better place."

She worked with her needle to support herself and her one child, a
little boy of ten; and by and by when he came in pretty wet from some
outdoor occupation we made his acquaintance and the discovery that he
was a little boy of an original character. He was so much to his mother,
who, poor soul, had nobody else in the world to love, that she was
always haunted by the fear of losing him. He was her boy, the child of
her body, exclusively her own, unlike all other boys, and her wise heart
told her that if she put him in a school he would be changed so that she
would no longer know him for her boy. For it is true that our schools
are factories, with a machinery to unmake and remake, or fabricate, the
souls of children much in the