hardly have been thirty. It was the stress of personal
service that had marred her so young. Did her jacket need mending? As I
have since learnt, at that period the youngest of her family was unborn,
and the oldest cannot have been more than eight or nine. Besides nursing
her sister, therefore, she had several children to wait upon, as well as
her husband--a man often ailing in health. For all I know she was even
then, as certainly she has been since, obliged to go out working for
money, so as to keep the family going; and, seeing that she was a
mother, it is probable that she herself had already known the extremity
of hardship.

Because, as scarcely needs saying, the principle of self-help is
strained to the uttermost at time of child-birth. Then, the other
members of the family have to shift for themselves as best they can,
with what little aid neighbours can find time to give; and where there
are young children in the cottage, it is much if they are sufficiently
fed and washed. But it is the situation of the mother herself that most
needs to be considered. Let me give an illustration of how she fares.

Several years ago there was a birth in a cottage very near to me. Only a
few hours before it happened the woman had walked into the town to do
her shopping for herself and carry home her purchases. As soon as the
birth was known, a younger sister, out at service, got a week's holiday,
so that she might be at hand to help, though there was no spare room in
the cottage where she could sleep. During that week, also, the parish
nurse came in daily, until more urgent cases occupied all her time.
After that the young mother was left to her own resources. According to
someone I know, who looked in from time to time, she lay in bed with her
new-born baby, utterly alone in the cottage, her husband being away at
work all day for twelve hours, while the elder children were at school.
She made no complaint, however, of being lonely; she thought the
solitude good for her. But she was worried by thinking of the fire in
the next room--the living-room, which had the only fireplace in the
house, there being none in her bedroom--lest it should set fire to the
cottage while she lay helpless. It seems that the hearth was so narrow
and the grate so high that coals were a little apt to fall out on to the
floor. Once, she said, there had almost been "a flare-up." It was when
she was still getting about, and she had gone no farther away than