relief to this class_; and it should be given liberally. It will not be given in vain. Of course there are many in this class not gifted with an active temperament, or a strong, mind. To such the warning from the chairman, that parochial assistance can only be temporary, must be frequently given: and sometimes her views and progress may be scrutinised and commented upon. The relief would be continued from time to time and in descending amounts, until it vanishes altogether. By this method of treatment an increase of expenditure may be occasioned for a time; but the widow will be delivered from her affliction, _and her children's names permanently erased from the black roll of pauperism_. The fifth class includes those widows who have, throughout their lives, been accustomed to labour. They have not the advantages of the former class, as regards connexions. They have been "dragged"[4] up. As an infant, "it was never sung to: no one ever told it a tale of the nursery. It was dragged up, to live or die, as it happened. It had no young dreams: it broke at once into the iron realities of life. The child exists not for the very poor as any object of dalliance; it is only another mouth to be fed, a pair of little hands to be betimes inured to labour. It is the rival, till it can be the co-operator, for food with the parent. It is never his mirth, his diversion, his solace; it never makes him young again, with recalling his young times. The children of the very poor have no young times. It makes the very heart bleed to overhear the casual street-talk between a poor woman and her little girl, a woman of the better sort of poor, in a condition rather above the squalid beings which we have been contemplating. It is not of toys, of nursery-books, of summer holidays, (fitting that age); of the promised sight, or play; of praised sufficiency at school. It is of mangling and clear-starching, of the price of coals, or of potatoes. The questions of the child, that should be the very outpourings of curiosity in idleness, are marked with forecast and melancholy providence. It has come to be a woman before it was a child. It has learned to go to market; it chaffers, it haggles, it envies, it murmurs; it is knowing, acute, sharpened: it never prattles." Such was the child. The passage from the single to the married state, which generally changes the course of woman's life, has to her been nothing more than a brief interval of pleasure. She soon joins the bands of the busy daughters of care. So the loss of her husband has been to her but a tragedy. The last act is over; the curtain has fallen: she is now in the outer world again; she is oppressed by sadness, vague and undefinable; but the noise and bustle around her, the tumult of her own thoughts, and her continued labour, afford that alleviation which the solitary and the unemployed seek for in vain. Those who would step in and, relieve her of her toil, may be