The place where food is bought is important. How it is bought and when are also important questions. The usual plan for a Lambeth housekeeper is to make her great purchase on Saturday evening when she gets her allowance. She probably buys the soap, wood, oil, tea, sugar, margarine, tinned milk, and perhaps jam, for the week. To these she adds the Sunday dinner, which means a joint or part of a joint, greens, and potatoes. The bread she gets daily, also the rasher, fish, or other relish, for her husband’s special use. Further purchases of meat are made, if they are made, about Wednesday, while potatoes and pot herbs, as well as fish, often come round on barrows, and are usually bought as required. When she has put aside the rent, the insurance, the boot club money, and spent the Saturday night’s five or six shillings, she keeps the pennies for the gas-meter and the money for the little extras in some kind of purse or private receptacle which lives within reach of her hand. A woman, during the time she is laid up at her confinement, will sleep with her purse in her hand or under the pillow, and during the daytime she doles out with an anxious heart the pennies for gas or the two-pences for father’s relish. She generally complains bitterly that the neighbour who is “doing” for her has a heavy hand with the margarine, and no conscience with the tea or sugar. The regular shopping is monotonous. The order at the grocer’s shop is nearly always the same, as is also that at the oilman’s. The Sunday dinner requires thought, but tends to repeat itself with the more methodical housewife, who has perhaps a leaning towards neck of mutton as the most interesting of the cheaper joints, or towards a half-shoulder as cutting to better advantage. It is often the same dinner week after week—one course of meat with greens and potatoes. Some women indulge in flights of fancy, and treat the family to a few pounds of fat bacon at 6d. per pound, a quality which is not to be recommended, or even to the extravagance of a rabbit and onions for a change. These women would be likely to vary the vegetables too; and in their accounts tomatoes, when tomatoes are cheap, may appear. It is only in the budgets of the very small family, however, that such extravagant luxuries would creep in.