“Now come with me to 36, C——, and see Mrs. J——e R——e. She is a young woman of superior intelligence, and has a trustable face—very. She may be about seven-and-twenty. She lost her husband in the same ship. He was thirty years of age, and, to use her own words, ‘such a happy creature; so full of jokes.’ He was engaged as second engineer, at £4 10s. and board. ‘After his ship was loaded he was a changed man; he got his tea without saying a word, and then sat looking into the fire in a deep study, like. I asked him what ailed him, and he said, more to himself than to me, “She’s such a beast!” I thought he meant the men’s place was dirty, as he had complained before that there was no place to wash. He liked to be clean, my husband, and always had a good wash when he came home from the workshop, when he worked ashore. So I said, “Will you let me come on board to clean it out for you?” And he said, still looking at the fire, “It ain’t that.” Well, he hadn’t signed, only agreed, so I said, “Don’t sign, Jim,” and he said he wouldn’t, and went and told the engineer he shouldn’t go. The engineer “spoke so kindly to him,” and offered him 10s. a month more. He had had no work for a long time, and the money was tempting,’ she said, ‘and so he signed. When he told me I said, “You won’t go, Jim, will you?” He said, “Why, Minnie, they will put me in gaol if I don’t go.” I said, “Never mind, you can come home after that.” “But,” said he, “they called me a coward, and you would not like to hear me called that.”’ “The poor woman was crying very bitterly, so I said gently, ‘I hope you won’t think I am asking all these questions from idle curiosity;’ and I shall never forget her quick disclaimer, for she saw that I was troubled with her: ‘Oh no, sir; I am glad to answer you, for so many homes might be kept from being desolate if it was only looked into.’ “I ascertained that she is ‘getting a bit winning for a livelihood,’ as my informant phrased it, by sewing for a ready-made clothes-shopkeeper. She was in a small garret with a sloping roof and the most modest fireplace I ever saw; just three bits of iron laid from side to side of an opening in the brickwork, and two more up the front; no chimney-piece, or jambs, or stone across the top, but just the bricks laid nearer and nearer until the courses united. So I don’t fancy she could be earning much. But with the very least money value in the place, it was as beautifully clean as I ever saw a room in my life. “I also saw a poor woman, who had lost her son aged twenty-two. She too cried bitterly, as she spoke with _such_ love and pride of her son, and of the grief of his father, who was sixty years of age. Her son was taken on as a stoker, and worked on the ship some days before she was ready for sea. He did not want to go when he saw how she was loaded. She looked like a floating wreck, but they refused to pay him the money he had earned unless he went, and he too was lost with the others.