But while I am writing this, February 6, a letter reaches me from the matron, asking questions about my arrangement for the future life of one of the women, and, like most ladies, she adds a postscript: ‘P.S.--Excuse this short letter, but they are making so much noise, laughing and shouting and playing ping-pong, that I am bewildered.’ Sweated drudges, hopeless, broken women, laughing, shouting, and playing ping-pong! I felt rewarded for my trouble. The sea air, good food, and rest, are fine tonics even in the winter. Appetite comes by eating. The desire to increase happiness increases by giving happiness. I am not content, neither do I want to be content. Did not old Augustine say, ‘The man that says “Enough!” that man’s soul is lost?’ I have tasted the delight of making some of the poorest and most miserable glad, and I long to see more fully the realization of my hopes. I am told by some worthy people that I am ‘spoiling’ these women. I want to. ‘You will make them dissatisfied with their own homes.’ I hope I may, for the apathetic content of the poor with their dirt and misery constitutes the greatest danger. From such content may God deliver them! But who can estimate the value to these hard-working women of a few weeks’ rest and refreshment at a place where the life-giving qualities of the sea may invigorate them and its mighty diapason soothe them? But while the heart is touched and our sympathies are quickened at the sufferings of these women, and while it is easy to be charitable and philanthropic with regard to them, what new condemnation can be brought against the social conditions and the sanitary conditions under which they live and work? To me it seems rank absurdity, savouring almost of national insanity, that a country like ours, knowing what we know, and fearing what we fear, should tolerate them. We have endless and learned talk about ‘germs’; microbes are sought for and classified; sanitation is reduced to a science; isolation in fever or small-pox cases is rigidly insisted on. Yet in hundreds of fœtid and pestilential dens a thousand and one articles of every-day use for the personal comfort or gratification of every section of the community and for every period of life are made. But Nature knows no pity, break her laws, and she arises and smites you when and where you least expect it. As we sow we shall and must reap. And I would like to force it upon the mind of the nation that, if we continue to make our blouses, shirts, children’s pinafores, and babies’ clothing, our fur jackets and our cheap mantles, our tooth-brushes, corsets, match-boxes, and artificial flowers in the mansions of misery, in the dens of disease and death, then of a verity weeping and wailing and the voice of mourning shall be heard in the land. Many must suffer, but they may be the innocent. So kiss your darlings. Your first-born, proud young mothers, put their pretty hats or bonnets on their sweet