Esther S., aged ten, and a sister aged six, help their mother at the midday break, and also in the evening, in lining and covering boxes. 5d. a gross is paid for the smaller sort; 1s. 9d. for the larger sort. The work of the children is said to be absolutely necessary. “Dreadful home; nice woman,” is the observation of the visitor whose notes I have been permitted to use. A schoolfellow of Esther’s, Sarah W., is thirteen years old and in Standard 4. Her father was in prison. Her mother drinks. These parents hid their children for eight months, and the educational authorities had great difficulty in finding them. This child, “a very bright girl,” used to stay up all night making match boxes, so as to get them taken in by 11 the next morning. She now works, between school times, at capping sticks. Another little girl sews and opens Japanese fish and poultry baskets, and sews the handles upon string bags; she also sometimes makes the bags. She does not like the work, because it makes her hands sore and is hard work. “I can do nearly everything,” this person of thirteen is reported as saying. Employment out of school hours is not of course confined to girls. Stanley G., aged eleven, works from 5 to 7, wiring tooth brushes, and can do seven in an hour; 3½d. a dozen is paid for them. The visitor notes that he had a sore face. Alfred D., age 13, Standard 7, helps in making white kid belts, receives 1d. in the dozen, and can do fifteen or sixteen dozen in the week. George W., who is thirteen years old, and only in Standard 3, does wood chopping and dislikes it, because it hurts his hands. His mother “does frame work,” and his father, looking glasses. Thomas P., who is thirteen, and in Standard 5, polishes spindle legs for a cabinet maker, from 5 to 8 every evening, and from 9 to 2 on Saturdays. He receives 2s. 6d. a week; and announces that he is going to be a tobacconist—a calling for which the polishing of furniture legs hardly seems a valuable preparation. Cases like these might be multiplied almost indefinitely. “At a recent enquiry during the spring of this year, it was found that in a Hackney school one-fourth of the girls were engaged in match box making, steel covering, baby shoe making and fish basket sewing. This latter work is of a specially disagreeable character, and little girls often complain that the manipulation of the reeds is a most painful process. Children working with their parents at home are frequently kept at their sewing or pasting until ten or eleven o’clock at night. They are sent to “shop” before coming to school in the morning, and many of them are never marked for regular attendance. Particularly severe is the lot of the children of small laundresses, who are often employed, both in housework and in ironing in a steam laden atmosphere, two or three nights weekly till ten o’clock, and all day Saturday.”[32]