Again, to be quiet, to be alone are among influences that purify. Every one when abroad has, I suppose, felt the privilege of being able to go into the churches whenever they wished. In our great towns the privilege is equally needed, and, where the poor live, doubly so. When one room has to be shared by the whole family, sometimes including a lodger, there can be no quiet, and loneliness is impossible. Some of the clergy are recognising this want, and open their churches at other than service times, but the practice is still rare. A notice outside our church tells how those may enter who ‘wish to think or pray in quietness.’ About ten a day use the permission, some of them kneeling shyly in the side aisle, as if their attitude were unwonted and caused shame; others sitting quietly for a long time, as if weary of the grind and noise outside; while sometimes men come to make their mid-day prayer. Here again is a means with invisible results; but quiet and loneliness are possessions to which every one has a right, without which it is difficult, almost impossible, to ‘commune with God,’ and the gift of which is still to be given to the poor. Then there is the beauty of Art, now almost entirely absent from the dwellings of the poor, and yet by them so felt as a pleasure; the beauty of form and colour, which it is possible to show in schoolroom and church decoration; the beauty of light and brightness, the beauty of growth to be seen in gardens and churchyards. Outside our church are planted two Virginia creepers; poor things they are, hardly to be recognised by their relations in kindlier soil. But once, in a third-class carriage, I was surprised to hear the church described as the one ‘where the jennies growed.’ It is easier now (thanks to the Kyrle Society and Miss Harrison’s generous gifts of work) to make school and mission rooms pretty. A beautiful workroom is a very strong, though invisible, influence. One girl, who had to leave our school on account of moving from the neighbourhood, said quite naturally, among her regrets at leaving and her description of the new school, ‘It is so ugly it makes one not care.’ The pictures in a schoolroom should be various, and, if possible, often changed. Pictures of action or of historical incidents are the most generally appreciated, but pictures of flowers, fairy tales, landscapes, and sea are suggestive.