While I acknowledge the receipt of your favor and enclosed cheque for five hundred pounds, permit me, in the name of the suffering of France, to thank you and your Committee most earnestly for the same. Your generous gift will enable me to send comfort into hundreds of desolate and more distraught families, whom I have hitherto been unable to reach. I beg you will permit me to explain that my attempts to clothe the people of France have not been the result of a desire to improve the personal appearance, but to aid in ridding them a little, if possible, from the scourge of pestilence and vermin which the war has so terribly spread among them. It is to be hoped that few will die of outright hunger during the next six months, but thousands must fall pitiful victims to disease lurking in the only old rags, in which months ago they escaped from fire and destruction. Disease is spread from one family to another, until thousands who are well to-day will rot with smallpox and be devoured by body lice before the end of August. Against the progress of these two scourges there is, I believe, no check but the destruction of all infected garments; hence the imperative necessity for something to take their place. Excuse, sir, I pray you, the plain, ugly terms which I have employed to express myself; the facts are plain and ugly. How industrious she was in Paris and how bravely and cheerfully she did her work is shown by two home letters which she sent out simultaneously in September, one to her sister Sally and the other to Mrs. Bernard Vassall, her long-time friend, Fannie Childs Vassall: PARIS, Sept. 18, 1871 MY DEAR FANNIE: