Another enquired if I thought widows should remarry. Lastly, among begging letters that visit the working-woman’s desk like so many buzzing flies, one covering many pages may be taken as a specimen. A youth, a French polisher by trade, wrote that he had given up his situation: taken to writing: failed and become a tramp. After many hardships, having only one penny left, he bought a postage-stamp and hoped to find a _Who’s Who_ in his inn. He was unsuccessful, but discovered a _Literary Year-Book_, which he opened by chance, and his eyes fell on my name; therefore he sent me a most lengthy appeal for help, adding a promise of repayment as he had a prospect of work. Truly strange epistles drift into the working-woman’s letter-box, and each steals a little time from her busy day. Once an unknown person, chancing to read an article of mine on Lourdes, sent me sixteen closely written pages in French, betraying a profound anxiety on the writer’s part to convert me to Roman Catholicism. Then come letters of a different kind requesting loans. They may be from the Royal Geographical Society, or the Earl’s Court Exhibition, or a lace collection, or perhaps some clergyman in the East End, but the letters come and the letters have to be answered. The writers generally require the loan of curios from Iceland, Finland, Norway, Mexico, Morocco, Sicily; or any country, in fact, with which one’s name is associated. Lists have to be made, the objects looked out, packed, sent, placed, fetched, unpacked. Sometimes things get damaged, or lost, and then no one seems responsible. People write asking for patronage; the loan of one’s name as a patroness to soup kitchens, charity concerts, balls, clubs, hospital bazaars, or collections by a friend for some charity. I was once asked by an unknown man to be godmother to his child. Soaps have asked for my patronage, and a motor-car was suggested as a free gift (it was the early days of motoring) if I would drive it through the streets of London. Letters from women and men aspiring to literature—and verily half the world seems to think literary gifts are as common as pens and inkpots; letters from the natives of all the countries about which I have ever written, asking for help, or “for money to buy a ticket home because they are stranded in London and destitute”; or a fond father wishing to start his son in mining writes to ask my experience of mines in Mexico; while perhaps a mother thinks my experience would solve a question whether her daughter, who is a hospital nurse, would find a good opening in Canada; and, again, a girl starting a dairy enquires for hints on the Danish procedure. Letters modestly ask me if through my medical connection I can get “a poor friend” seen by a doctor gratis; or if I can give someone an introduction for the stage, or hear somebody else sing or recite, and see what he or she had better do with their talent.