daily task and common round being a mile walk to the
factory, ten hours' work, and then the return journey. One week-end on
her homeward journey she was attracted and excited by a fire; when she
resumed her journey she was penniless, her week's wages had been stolen
from her. Her only warm jacket and decent pair of boots then had to
be pawned, for the rent must be paid. Monday found her again at the
monotonous round, but with added hardships.

She missed the jacket and the boots, and deprived herself of food
that she might save enough money wherewith to take them out of pawn.
Christmas Eve came, and she had not recovered them. She sat in her room
lonely and with a sad heart, but there was mirth and noise below her,
for even among the poor Bacchus must be worshipped at Christmas time.

One of the women thought of the poor lone creature up at the top of the
house, and fetched her down. They had their bottles of cheap spirits,
for which they had paid into the publican's Christmas club. She drank,
and forgot her misery. Next morning, when the bells of a neighbouring
church were ringing out, they awoke her as she lay fully dressed on her
little bed. She felt ill and dazed, and by and by the consciousness came
to her of fast night's drinking. Christmas Day she spent alone, ill,
miserable and ashamed. "I must have been drunk!" she kept repeating to
herself, and on Christmas night she sought her death.

I wrote to kind friends, and interested some ladies in her welfare.
Plenty of clothing was sent for her; a better room, not quite so
near the sky, was procured for her. Her daily walk to the factory was
stopped, for more profitable work was given to her. Finally I left her
in the hands of kind friends that I knew would care for her.

Two years passed, and on Christmas Eve I called with a present and a
note sent her by a friend. She was gone--her husband had been released
on ticket-of-leave, had found her and joined her, and for a time she
kept him as well as herself. He was more brutal than before, and in his
fury, either drunk or sober, he frequently beat her, so that the people
of the house had to send them away. Where they had moved to, I failed to
find out, but they had vanished!

Fourteen months passed, and one bitterly cold day in February at the
end of a long row of prisoners, waiting their turn to appear before
the magistrate, stood the woman wretched and ill, with a puling bit of
mortality in her arms.

She was a