and over again was he obliged to sit by this wretched woman’s bedside till breakfast time, and then had to go to work as usual. Let anybody who has seen a case of this kind say whether the State ought not to provide for the relief of such men as John, and whether he ought not to have been able to send his wife away to some institution where she might have been tended and restrained from destroying, not merely herself, but her husband and her child. John hardly bore up under this sorrow. A man may endure much, provided he knows that he will be well supported when his day’s toil is over; but if the help for which he looks fails, he falls. Oh those weary days in that dark back dining-room, from which not a square inch of sky was visible! weary days haunted by a fear that while he was there unknown mischief was being done! weary days, whose close nevertheless he dreaded! Beaten down, baffled, disappointed, if we are in tolerable health we can contrive to live on some almost impossible chance, some most distant flicker of hope. It is astonishing how minute a crack in the heavy uniform cloud will relieve us; but when with all our searching we can see nothing, then at last we sink. Such was John’s case when I first came to know him. He attracted me rather, and bit by bit he confided his story to me. He found out that I might be trusted, and that I could sympathise, and he told me what he had never told to anybody before. I was curious to discover whether religion had done anything for him, and I put the question to him in an indirect way. His answer was that “some on ’em say there’s a better world where everything will be put right, but somehow it seemed too good to be true.” That was his reason for disbelief, and heaven had not the slightest effect on him. He found out the room, and was one of our most constant friends.