But, besides these country parties which town-dwellers are quite unable to give, there is still left to us Londoners the possibility (not to say duty) of inviting the poor to our own houses. Our poor neighbours have not been asked to many such parties, but the few to which they have been bidden have been very pleasant. At one our hostess, but lately returned from the East, had arranged _tableaux-vivants_ introducing Oriental costumes in her drawing-room, and the guests were delighted at seeing the people of the one foreign nation of which they knew anything--the Bible having been the literature which made them conversant with that--as large as life, and all ‘real men and solid women.’ Another time a little charade was got up, and proud was the mother whose baby was pressed into early service as a play-actor. Other friends have entertained us after a visit to the Kensington Museum or Zoological Gardens, while some evenings have been passed in much the same way as by other people who meet for social pleasure; with talk, music, strange foreign things, portfolios, and puzzles, though games may, perhaps, have occupied a somewhat longer time than is usual among guests with more conversational interests. To all of us have these parties given much pleasure--pleasure which is, in truth, healthful and refreshing amid the sorrow and pain so liberally mingled in the life’s cup of the poor. ‘This evening I’ve forgot all the winter’s troubles,’ followed the ‘Good-night’ from the lips of a pain-broken woman; and considering the ‘winter’s troubles’ included the death of a child and the semi-starvation resulting from the almost constant out-of-work condition of the husband, the party seemed a strangely inadequate means of producing even temporarily so large a result. The efforts made to attend are one of the signs of how much these and the country parties are enjoyed. One woman came, with her puling, pink ten-days-old baby, and both men and women constantly get up from a sick-bed to return to it again as soon as the pleasure is over. ‘We can’t afford to lose it, yer see; they don’t come too often,’ is the sort of answer one usually receives in reply to remonstrance. But this paper will accomplish its object if ‘they do come oftener,’ and if not only the poor of our big London, to whom we owe special duties, but if the poor of all great cities are more thought of in the light of guests.