Surely no palace grand, no poplar-dwarfing sun-kissed steeple, no Moslem mosque gold glittering in Eastern city, contains such deep meanings to reverent minds as a carpenter’s shop. No ancient mausoleum, no Egyptian pyramid, containing swathed mummy bones of ancient Pharoah, who scuttled through life’s short day, may call forth such sentiments, or inspiration to die if need be on behalf of the poor and the needy, the homeless and friendless. So to this humble shop came the children. Here came the boys and girls who had struck against Council Syntax and Burston Junkerism. They were helped by their mothers. If the lot of the agricultural labourer, the Lazarus of civilisation, is hard, the lot of the labourers’ labourer is harder still. Little joy in life has she. Divorced from the beauties of science and art, no electric lights, no hot and cold water on the slopstone, no airy, fairy, decorated bedrooms, no well paved and lighted streets, no quick transit, no musical evenings, scientific lectures, melodious operas, sweet string bands, no cinema, no long cycle. No! Grinding toil. Dark, slushy, snowy lanes in winter, grime and poverty, poor wages, daily struggles, patching and mending, sewing and knitting, washing and baking, sometimes toiling and moiling in rain-swept fields for bare pittance, wearing sodden shoddy, or soaking on wind-swept wastes. Go to Burston and meet your sisters, keeping up their hearts on miserable wages, and even giving out of their scant doles a little offering to their beloved strike school. With scarce a copper to bless themselves with, they rented the carpenter’s shop at £3 per year. Out o’ poorly furnished homes they gave their chairs, their tables, stools, lamps, knick-knacks, of little value perhaps, but potent as widows’ mite. They cleaned, scrubbed, scoured, and mothered that school, as they are doing it to-day. Lucky scholars to have so much mother-love enveloping them! To have such mem’ries clustering round. To think that the world’s toiler, sweet son o’ Mary, spent His early college days in the carpenter’s shop. Was He not apprenticed to manual labour? Did He not sanctify it? May He not have rehearsed future discourses and similar surroundings, whilst sawing and planing, mending, making, and creating in His self-chosen University of Adversity, so that He might humanise the world, the world which to-day is deaf to His teachings. Had His parables, His philosophy of honest poverty, His contempt of lordship and riches been laid to heart, Europe would not be in flames to-day. And, as my labour of love draws to a close, I grieve to say that trouble is coming to Burston village once more. The rector has given notice to three of the glebe tenants. The blind man, who let the carpenter’s shop, is one. This means the closing down of the school. Two other parents are also in similar plight, and this is a presage of further victimisation perchance in the future.