“I wonder that ladies do not visit our large laundries,” remarked the superintendent. This visitation has been begun by members of the Y.W.C.A. May it prosper! These workers in the steam laundries have a hard life of it, and stand for long, long hours over their laborious toil. Here are elderly women and young girls, ready to welcome anyone who will say a kind word to them, and, perhaps, benefit them thereby. “I like a whole story that I can read all through,” said one of the latter, and the cheap reprints of good stories published by the Religious Tract Society are invaluable. Moreover, they can be lent from one to another. It is strange that one still meets with people comparatively young who cannot read. Much of their religious knowledge is often due to hymns. A man said he liked the old hymns best, and had known “Glory to Thee” by heart ever since he was a boy. Others are proud of the fact that their children will read to them whatever we are pleased to give them, and sometimes even beg for a book apiece for all the olive branches—“For fear one should be jealous of the other,” said a cabman. To which we replied that “jealousy was expensive.” The other day we fell in with a gipsy encampment: vans and tents settled on a bit of waste land, having been turned out of a neighbouring holding for building purposes. In one of the tents we found a young man and woman, a lovely three-year-old child, and an infant not yet a fortnight old. The father of the family, aged twenty-two, had been to night-school once upon a time, but his learning was nil; the mother, seated on the ground, baby in arms, could not read; but a ragged urchin who had crept in was going to school the following Monday. The young couple were strangely handsome, and rejoiced in the gipsy name of Loveridge. The woman said she had prayed to the Lord when she was ill. “What else was there to do? I have never been a great sinner; you know what I mean, ma’am. A gentleman comes here to preach on Sunday.” She did not seem fully to apprehend her need of a Saviour, but acknowledged that we were all sinners. It was a strange, sad scene. She, seated on her bed of rags at one end of the small, dark, smoky, stifling tent; her husband also on the ground making skewers at the other, and apologising for untidiness; the infant apparently dying, the little girl affectionately stroking our garments. The mother said she had had no food that day, for the times were bad; and the trifle we offered was instantly despatched to a shop at some distance for “a little oatmeal and arrowroot,” the husband being the joyful messenger. Still, she said she liked tent-life better than she should life within stone walls. “I have been used to it, and I suppose it is what we are brought up in that we like best,” she added, simply, and in perfect English.