Unfortunately some doubt is thrown on the sincerity of this testimonial by the sketch "Portia in Petticoats" in 1882--a burlesque description of a solicitor's office where only women clerks are employed. After a week's absence the head of the firm returns to find that they have mostly disappeared, eloped or got married. The election of Miss Maude Stanley, a cousin of the Dean, as a Guardian in 1877 is the subject of a friendly notice at the expense of Bumble, who regards it as a "most unporochial innowation." In the same year _Punch_ views with admiration the beneficent work of the Ladies' Sanitary Association, established twenty years earlier to inculcate the value of healthy, sensible habits by means of lectures, tracts and handbooks. The suggestion made by a Hastings doctor in 1879 that women might be employed as dispensers is praised, though not without some reserves, in "Girls among the Gallipots," and the new "Ladies' Association for the Promotion of Horticulture and Minor Food Production" founded in the same year by Mrs. Thorne meets with _Punch's_ unqualified approval. This is the first mention that I have met in _Punch_ of a movement which led to the establishment of the horticultural schools at Swanley and elsewhere and the numerous poultry farms run by women all over the country. The institution of the "Royal Red Cross" decoration for nurses in 1883 is welcomed in friendly doggerel. As Bumble had condemned women guardians, so Mrs. Gamp is now represented as very indignant and contemptuous of the "nursing sisters," their position and recognition. But _Punch_ had no use here for amateurs. There is excellent point in Du Maurier's picture of the applicant for the post of matron or head nurse to a hospital who based her claim on being "not trained but gifted." By 1885 the female commercial traveller was apparently already in existence, but _Punch_ treated this innovation with jocular suspicion:-- I know a Maiden with a bag, Take care! She carries samples in a drag, Beware! beware! O Draper fond, She is fooling thee! She has the true "Commercial" style, Take care! To which she addeth woman's guile, Beware! beware! O Grocer goose, She is plucking thee! And so on with other shopkeepers.