In every home that professes to any respectability, foot-binding is an absolutely essential thing for the girls in it. To neglect this would be to confound them with slave girls, whose feet are never bound, and with the children of the very lowest classes whose poverty would not admit of their adopting this polite custom. It has been found by a very large experience that a girl must be eight years old before her feet will bear the tremendous strain that is put upon them, in the effort to destroy the handiwork of nature. It is true that in some of the more wealthy homes, where a very small foot is a sign of blue blood, they begin as soon as the girl is six to put her to the torture, but this is not the general rule. By the time the girl is eight, the bones of the feet have become sufficiently hardened to bear the incessant pressure that is put upon them to contract the feet into such a small compass that they will go into a shoe of two or three inches in length. The process begins by turning all the toes, except the large one, on to the sole of the foot. This of course is a slow but an exceedingly painful one. It is continued week after week and month after month for several years until the toes have been thrown back, at the expense of the instep, which is made to bulge out by the pressure of the bandages; until finally the "Golden lilies," as these unsightly objects are called, are complete, and the poor girl is a veritable cripple for life. The cruelty that is practised upon these poor children during the initial operation of binding is very severe. The first few weeks are so very trying that attempts are made by the girls to tear the bandages from their aching, tortured feet. This is resisted by their mothers, who have to resort to brutal methods to keep the little hands from endeavouring to relieve themselves of the pain that has become intolerable. Tears and shrieks and groans that last all day long, and are heard through the sobs of the poor things, as sleep, restless and disturbed, comes to try and make them forget the agony they are enduring, are the constant experiences in that unhappy home.