Another young mother came to see me, but she was of quite another type. Not the helpless apathetic girl, whom sorrow robs of feeling, but a woman young, strong and beautiful, but maddened by despair. As she pressed her tiny babe to her heart she said, "What am I to do? We must live. I cannot see my baby starve and yet I can't get work, for nobody wants me with a babe at my breast. It is a hard, hard path in this great city for the woman who wants to keep good and do right, but it seems, for the one who goes wrong and does evil, that there is plenty of good food, fine clothes, warmth and shelter. I don't want to do that, I can't sell my soul, so I was on my way to the river, which seemed the best place for baby and me." In just such cases as these the friend in the hour of need can save the misstep and point out the better, safer way to the weary, stumbling feet. We have two Children's Homes, to which not only children, but mothers can be sent, to tide them over until strong enough to work and get a little home together. Here is another case of a woman who made a brave struggle to keep herself and her three children alive. She worked early and late and for a long while kept her home together. Sickness came and then starvation stared her in the face. A delicate, refined woman, she could not beg; she was finally discovered almost too late, seemingly sick unto death. Carefully and tenderly she was nursed back to health. One child died and was buried. Thank God, not in Potter's Field, but where the mother could see where her darling lay. As she recovered from the delirium of sickness, she asked of what the baby died. "Tell her that it was sick," the doctor said, "its little heart stopped, but never let her know that her child starved to death." And she never did. The father is home by now, and works hard every day. The door is shut upon the sad past. They are happy children and thankful parents. We try to keep a fund to meet the needs of these families; a little help in meeting the rent, providing suitable clothing for the children who attend school, money for medicine or nourishing foods when there is sickness, may just tide them over and prevent great misery, without in any sense robbing them of their self-respect or making them dependent upon charity. These stories give you only a glimpse of the wide field. They could be multiplied by the score, aye by the hundred, but even then the much that lies beneath and behind the work, must be seen and felt to be understood. XI SANTA CLAUS RESURRECTED Christmas is a sad season in prison, because it is, perhaps of all days, the one when thoughts most surely circle around home and when pictures of past happy days shine out in vivid contrast to the lonely narrow cell with its bare walls and heavy barred door. But if it is a sad day for the men within the walls it is equally so for many of the families who have to abandon the thought of any Christmas cheer to brighten their poverty.