into
her garden to feed the fowls; but in that interval a coal fell beyond
the fender, and she, returning, found the place full of smoke and the
old hearthrug afire. The dread that this might happen again distressed
her now as she lay alone, unable to move.

I could furnish more pitiful tales than this, if need were--tales of
women in child-bed tormented with anxiety because their husbands are out
of work, and there is no money in the cottage, and no prospect of any;
or harassed by the distress of little children who miss the help which
the mother cannot give, and so on. But this case illustrates the normal
situation. Here there was no actual destitution, nor any fear of it, and
the other children were being cared for. The husband was earning a pound
a week at constant work, and the circumstances of the family were on the
whole quite prosperous. But one of the conditions of prosperity was that
the father of the family should be away all day, leaving the mother and
infant unattended.

From whatever sickness the woman suffers, there is always the same
piteous story to be told--she is destitute of help. The household drudge
herself, she has no drudges to wait upon her. The other day I was told
of a woman suffering from pleurisy. Her husband had left home at six
o'clock for his work; a neighbour-woman came in to put on a poultice and
make things comfortable; then she, too, had to go to her work. In the
afternoon a visitor, looking in by chance, found that the sick woman
had been alone for five hours; she was parched with thirst, and her
poultice had gone cold. For yet one more example. I mentioned just now a
man who was killed on the railway. His widow, quite a young woman then,
reared her three or four children, earning some eight or nine shillings
a week at charing or washing for people in the town; and still she keeps
herself, pluckily industrious. There is one son living with her--an
errand-boy--and there are two daughters both in service at a large new
house in the village. During last spring the woman had influenza, and
had to take to her bed, her girls being permitted to take turns in
coming home to care for her. Just as she, fortunately, began to recover,
this permission was withdrawn: both girls were wanted in "their place,"
because a young lady there had taken influenza. So they had to forsake
their mother. But by-and-by one of these girls took the infection. Her
"place," then, was thought to be--at home. She wa