You have been looking over Water-works; isn’t beer good enough for the folks now-a-days? To be sure one cannot wash in beer, but it’s not much need one has for washing. I saw a little boy the other day, bothering about a cabstand; he wanted a bucket of water, but the tap was locked—and could be unlocked only for the horses. He said there was no water in his alley, and he looked as if there were no water in the world. I gave him twopence to go and buy a pint of beer, and went on, feeling that I had done a charitable action. Water indeed! Don’t you think, Mr. Conductor, that some of you reformers carry the thing a little bit too far? I wrote the other day to a grandson of mine, he sets up for a sanitary reformer, and because I was angry at a little rapscallion who stole three pounds of Wiltshire bacon (a nice lean piece) from my kitchen dresser, what does he write and say? I know what I wrote and said in answer very well. _He_ never darkens my doors again, and it’s 2000_l._ he will be out of pocket one of these days. I’ll just copy his impudence. He says— ‘Let it be supposed, grandmother, that you were born in one of the thousand London alleys; that you were nursed with milk and opiates by a mother able or willing to pay small attention to your wants. Your first recollection is of having ‘scalled head,’ a disgusting skin disease, begotten among dirt, with which poor ragged children are infested. Then you remember the death of a brother who was your baby playmate. He died of a fever. You remember other deaths, and how you pondered much in a child’s way, while playing with a pool of filth, upon this fever, what it was. You remember the pool in your undrained alley, when it was not quite so bad as it is now. You remember how you laboured three times a week, when water was turned on for two hours at the common tap, how you laboured for your mother to supply her want of it, and came with your bucket into competition with the tenants of the other houses, all eager to lay in a stock. You remember how you enjoyed a wash when you could get it; how you saw your mother strive to wash a tub full of linen in a pipkin full of water, and the precious juice then could not be thrown away until you had aided her attempt to scrub the floors with it. You remember how your father died of a fever, and you slept so near his corpse that when you were restless in the night once, you were awakened by your hand touching upon its cold face. You remember how your mother moaned by day, and how you heard her sob in the night season. So much, that now and then you went to kiss her. You remember when your elder sister drowned herself, nobody ever told you why;—you think you know why. How your mother went out, when she could, for a day’s work, but was too ragged and too dirty to find many patrons. How she took to gin-drinking, lost her old love for you, and her old memories. How you wished that you could find employment, but could find none for the ragged little wretch.