A year or so since there appeared in the pages of the _Pall Mall Gazette_ three graphic and astounding letters concerning the dreadful condition of a colony of women who “squatted” amongst the furze of Curragh Common, and subsisted on such miserable wage as the soldiers there quartered could afford to pay them. These creatures are known in and about the great military camp and its neighbourhood as “wrens.” They do not live in houses, or even huts, but build for themselves “nests” in the bush. To quote the words of the writer in question, these nests “have an interior space of about nine feet long by seven feet broad; and the roof is not more than four and a half feet from the ground. You crouch into them as beasts crouch into cover, and there is no standing upright till you crawl out again. They are rough misshapen domes of furze, like big rude birds’-nests, compacted of harsh branches, and turned topsy-turvy upon the ground. The walls are some twenty inches thick, and they do get pretty well compacted—much more than would be imagined. There is no chimney—not even a hole in the roof, which generally slopes forward. The smoke of the turf-fire which burns on the floor of the hut has to pass out at the door when the wind is favourable, and to reek slowly through the crannied walls when it is not. The door is a narrow opening, nearly the height of the structure—a slit in it, kept open by two rude posts, which also serve to support the roof. To keep it down and secure from the winds that drive over the Curragh so furiously, sods of earth are placed on top, here and there, with a piece of corrugated iron (much used in the camp, apparently—I saw many old and waste pieces lying about) as an additional protection from rain. Sometimes a piece of this iron is placed in the longitudinal slit aforesaid, and then you have a door as well as a doorway. Flooring there is none of any kind whatever, nor any attempt to make the den snugger by burrowing down into the bosom of the earth. The process of construction seems to be to clear the turf from the surface of the plain to the required space, to cut down some bushes for building material, and to call in a friendly soldier or two to rear the walls by the simple process of piling and trampling. When the nest is newly made, as that one was which I first examined, and if you happen to view it on a hot day, no doubt it seems tolerably snug shelter. A sportsman might lie there for a night or two without detriment to his health or his moral nature. But all the nests are not newly made; and if the sun shines on the Curragh, bitter winds drive across it, with swamping rains for days and weeks together, and miles of snow-covered plain sometimes lie between this wretched colony of abandoned women and the nearest town. Wind and rain are their worst enemies (unless we reckon-in mankind) and play ‘old gooseberry’ with the bush-dwellings. The beating of the one and the pelting of the other soon destroy their