A woman with a sick child—one of six—living in one room, was allowed milk for the use of the child, who was extremely ill. The only place where she could keep the milk was a basin with an old piece of wet rag thrown over it. The visitor found seven flies in the milk, and many others crawling on the inner side of the rag. The weather was stifling. The room, though untidy, was tolerably clean. But over the senseless child on the one bed in the room hovered a great cloud of flies. The mother stood hour after hour brushing them away. On the advice of the visitor the sick child was carried off there and then to the infirmary, where it ultimately recovered. Once the child was removed, the flies ceased to swarm into the room. Cooking, which has already been mentioned in connection with old and burnt saucepans and utensils, is necessarily very perfunctory and rudimentary. To boil a neck with pot herbs on Sunday, and make a stew of “pieces” on Wednesday, often finishes all that has to be done with meat. The intermediate dinners will ring the changes on cold neck, suet pudding, perhaps fried fish or cheap sausages, and rice or potatoes. Breakfast and tea, with the exception of the husband’s relishes, consist of tea, and bread spread with butter, jam, or margarine. In houses where no gas is laid on, the gas-stove cannot take the place of a missing oven, and it is extraordinary how many one-roomed dwellings are without an oven. Two pots, both burned, a frying-pan, and a kettle, do not make an equipment with which it is easy to manage the delicacies of cooking. Boiling can be done in a burnt saucepan, provided there is water enough in the can which stands behind the door to fill the pot sufficiently. Frying is held to be easy, but fat is not plentiful, and frying in Lambeth usually means frizzling in a very tiny amount of half-boiling grease. The great panful of fat which would be used by a good cook is impossible of attainment. To stand by and watch the cooking is difficult when so many things have to be done at once. The pot, once placed on the fire or the gas-stove, has to look after itself, while the mother nurses a baby, or does a bit of washing, or tidies the room and gets out the few plates which she calls “laying the dinner.” The children all come trooping in from school before she has finished, and have to be scolded a little and told to get out of the way, and when she has got them arranged sitting or standing round the table she helps each one as quickly and fairly as she can. If her husband is not there, she may put aside his portion to be warmed up and eaten later. She does not attempt to eat with the family. She is server and provider, and her work is to see that everyone gets a fair share, according to his or her deserts and the merits of the case. She may or may not sit down, but perhaps with the baby in her arms she feeds the youngest but one with potato and gravy or suet pudding, whichever is the dinner of the day, for fear it shall