destroyed. But under the present
conditions decent women have no chance of retaining their decency or
recovering their standing in social life.

Listen again! a widowed tooth-brush maker speaks to us: "Dear Mr.
Holmes, I feel that I must thank you for still allowing me a pension,
and I do thank you so much in increasing it. When I received it my heart
was so full of joy that I could not speak. My little boys are growing,
and they require more than when my husband died six years ago. I am sure
it has been a great struggle, but I have found such a great help in you,
I do not know how to thank you for all that you have done for me and
many poor workers.

"I do hope that God will still give you health and strength to carry
on the good work which you are doing for us. When I last spoke to you I
thought my little boys were much better, but I am sorry to say that when
I took them to Great Ormond Street Hospital, they said they were both
suffering from heart disease, and I was to keep them from school for a
time; and they also suffer from rheumatics. They are to get out all they
can. I have been taking them to the hospital for over two years, and
sometimes I feel downhearted, as I had hoped they would have improved
before this.

"The eldest boy does not have fits now, and this I am thankful for. But
I feel that I am wasting a lot of your time reading this letter, so I
must thank you very much for all your great goodness to me."

But one of the boys is now dead, to the other "fits" have returned, and
the widow still sits, sits and sits at her tooth-brushes in poverty and
hunger.

Listen to an old maid's story; she is a shoe machinist: "Yes, sir, I
have kept them for six years, and I hope to keep them till they can keep
themselves, and then perhaps they will help to keep me."

The speaker was a worn and feeble woman of fifty-five years, at least
that was the age she gave me, and most certainly she did not look less.
We were talking about her two boys, her nephews, whose respective ages
were eleven and thirteen.

"Both their parents died six years ago; their father was my only
brother, and their mother had neither brothers nor sisters! Of course I
took them; what else could I do? What! Send them to the workhouse? Not
while I can work for them. Ah, sir! you were only joking!" In this she
was partly right, for I had merely offered the suggestion in order to
draw her out.

"So after the double funeral they came to live with