for her breakfast, 10 pf. weekly for her lamp, and another 10 pf. for the use and comfort of the kitchen fire at night. Her dinner of soup, meat, and vegetables the girl gets at a _Privatküche_ for 40 pf. So the workgirl's weekly expenses for food, fire, and lodging are 5 marks 20 pf., but this does not give her an evening meal or afternoon coffee. The charwoman reckoned that she herself only had 15 marks a month for food, fire, light, and clothes; but she got nearly all her food with the families for whom she worked. She was a cheerful, honest body, and though she slept in a coal-hole was apparently quite healthy. She looked forward to her old age with tranquillity, because before long she would be in receipt of a pension from the State, a weekly sum that with her habits of thrift and industry would enable her to live. A German lady who chooses to teach in a _Volksschule_, because she thinks the _Volk_ more interesting than Higher Daughters, described a home to me from which one of her pupils came. The parents had eight children, and the family of ten lived in two rooms. That is a state of things we can match in England, unhappily. But my friend described this home, not on account of its misery, but for the extraordinary neatness and comfort the mother maintained in it. "Every time I go there," said my friend, who lived with her father and sister in a charming flat,--"every time I go there I say to the woman, if only it looked like this in my home"; and there was no need for me to see the rooms to understand what she meant; for I know the air of order and even of solidity with which the poorest Germans will surround themselves if they are respectable. They have very few pieces of furniture, but those few will stand wear and tear; they prefer a clean painted floor to a filthy carpet, and they are so poor that they have no pence to spend on plush photograph frames. I cannot remember what weekly wage this family existed on, but I know that it seemed quite inadequate, and when I asked if the children were healthy as well as clean and tidy, my friend admitted that they were not. In spite of the brave struggle made by the parents, it was impossible to bring up a large family on such means, and the maladies arising from insufficient food, fire, and clothing afflicted them. The case is, I think, a typical one. English people are always impressed when they visit German cities by the tidy clothes poor people wear, and if they are shown the right interiors, by their clean tidy homes. But you need most carefully and widely collected facts and figures to judge how far the children of a nation are suffering from poverty. It was found, for instance, in one German city, that out of 1472 children examined in the elementary schools, 63 per cent. of the girls and 60 per cent. of the boys were _nicht völlig normal_.