At about half past six on the morning after Christmas Day—a Sunday morning, when it was freezing hard and when there was a thick fog, the young man who lived on the ground floor awoke and got up to make tea for his wife. He found smoke in the room, and when he opened the door of the room in which his mother and sisters were sleeping, a burst of smoke met him. He succeeded in getting out his own family—in their nightdresses—sent a neighbour to call the fire engine, and tried in vain, as did a next door neighbour, to arouse the Jarvises. The firemen arrived within a very few minutes—three minutes, indeed, from the time of their summons—but the house was already in a blaze, the windows gone and the roof fallen in. The engine could not get through the posts at the entry of the court, but while it was being taken round to the back, a ladder was carried in, and a fireman bravely attempted to enter the burning house. But it was too late; all ten were already dead. All had, it was believed, been suffocated before the first call of their neighbour from below. The children had probably passed out of life without warning, but the mother was found lying on the floor, with her baby of seven months old in her arms, its body so protected by hers as to be scarcely burned at all. The father died next day in the infirmary, without having learned what fate had overtaken his wife and children; and their poor neighbours—for whom the weeks after Christmas are the leanest of the year—raised a subscription to defray the funeral expenses of the eleven, who were buried together. In all but its tragically sudden close the history of the Jarvis family is the history of scores of East End households. In some there is a husband in intermittent work; in some the mother is widowed; in all the children, if children there are, help; in all the human beings are slaves of the matchbox. The nine years since that December morning have brought no change, unless it be that, impossible though it would have appeared, pay has rather decreased than advanced, and that a recent investigation, not yet completed, seems to reveal a higher proportion of workers in receipt of out-relief. Such matchbox makers, if they worked at the same rates in the factory during the far shorter hours permitted by the Factory Acts, would earn no less than they do now, for they would no longer waste time in putting together box and drawer—whereby at present some other worker also wastes time in separating them again before they can be filled—and the employer would pay for paste and drying. That, indeed, is really the reason why they are working at home.