small and feeble
imitation in London, in the Woman's Protective Union, founded by Mrs.
Peterson, and now under the admirable management of Miss Black, but
still struggling for place and recognition.

Thus it will be seen that the work to be done here is necessarily more
sketchy in character, though none the less taken from life in every
detail, the aim in both cases being the same,--to give, as far as
possible, the heart of the problem as it is seen by the worker, as well
as by the eyes that may have larger interpretation for outward phases.
The homes and daily lives of the workers are the best answers as to the
comfort-producing power of wages, and in those homes we are to find what
the wage can do, and what it fails to do, not alone for the East End,
but for swarming lanes and courts in all this crowded London. The East
End has by no means the monopoly, though novelists and writers of
various orders have chosen it as the type of all wretchedness. But
London wretchedness is very impartially distributed. Under the shadow of
the beautiful abbey, and the towers of archiepiscopal Lambeth Palace;
appearing suddenly in the midst of the great warehouses, and the press
of traffic in the city itself, and thronging the streets of that borough
road, over which the Canterbury pilgrims rode out on that immortal
summer morning,--everywhere is the swarm of haggard, hungry humanity.
No winter of any year London has known since the day when Roman walls
still shut it in, has ever held sharper want or more sorrowful need.
Trafalgar Square has suddenly become a world-wide synonym for the
saddest sights a great city can ever have to show; and in Trafalgar
Square our search shall begin, following one of the unemployed to the
refuge open to her when work failed.

CHAPTER II.

IN TRAFALGAR SQUARE.

To the London mind nothing is more certain than that Trafalgar Square,
which may be regarded as the real focus of the city, is unrivalled in
situation and surroundings. "The finest site in Europe," one hears on
every side, and there is reason for the faith. In spite of the fact that
the National Gallery which it fronts is a singularly defective and
unimpressive piece of architecture, it hardly weakens the impression,
though the traveller facing it recalls inevitably a criticism made many
years ago: "This unhappy structure may be said to have everything it
ought not to have, and nothing which it ought to have. It possesses
windows with