‘But do you meet with any gratitude?’ I am often asked, for the ingratitude of the poor is a pet theme with many. I don’t go about the world looking for gratitude; if I did, I should not meet it. I want to see wrong redressed, toil lessened, comfort increased, homes replenished, children made glad, and sad hearts comforted. If I can see these things, I get joy, and never think of gratitude, but nevertheless it comes to me even when I do not look for it, and the following instance may show it. A married man had been sent to prison for six months, and richly he merited his sentence, for he had grossly assaulted his wife, the mother of eight children. He was a violent drunkard, and it was by no means his first offence. The wife was sadly injured, and was broken and nervous from the repeated assaults. But the home had to be kept together, and the children fed. She lived in the slums and became the prey of the sweater. One Sunday afternoon I called at her house, and knocked at the door, but there was no answer. The glass panel in the door being broken, I had no difficulty in gaining access. The various families in the different rooms took no notice of me as I went upstairs to a room the door of which stood open. I stood on the threshold for a moment and took in the whole scene. The woman, facing the window that overlooked a miserable ‘yard,’ sat at a sewing-machine, the incessant rattle of which told me that she was working for life. Her back was towards me, so she neither saw nor heard me. Before she had finished her seam I had time to notice that the floor was covered with ladies’ blouses, at the making of which she was earning the fancy price of tenpence per dozen, finding her own machine and thread. Last week she had made twelve dozen blouses, and had sat at the machine 108 hours for her ten shillings, earning somewhere about one penny per hour. She finished her seam, threw the garment to the heap, and turned to take another, when she caught sight of me, uttered a frightened scream, and fell off her seat into the heap of blouses. I called to one of her neighbours, and we gathered her up, when I could not fail to notice her condition--soon again to be a mother. I put the strap of the machine into my pocket and left her five shillings, the price of fifty-four hours’ work. In a few days I called again, and found her in bed, waited on by a little girl of ten who had now another little sister. A reference to this particular visit and the poverty she was in is made in the letter, of which I give a copy. But there, lying weak and ill, she inquired for the strap of the machine, which I gave to her, and in less than a week from her confinement the rattle of the machine was heard in her room.