Many women are giving themselves with the utmost devotion to the work of managing these hostels. The following accounts are given as typical workers’ experiences. Miss Alice Brown and her sister, Mrs. Ballantyne, have been in charge of a hostel for many months, and no more poignant human experience can be imagined. At the end of ten months over 1200 people had stayed with them, though there is accommodation for only about twenty people at a time. Miss Brown and Mrs. Ballantyne look after their visitors entirely during their stay, and with two or three voluntary helpers they keep the house and cook for a household which sometimes numbers fifty. Writing of her life at the hostel, Miss Brown says: “We have all our meals with our visitors, and family prayers after breakfast bring a quaint and cosmopolitan household together. They come from all parts of Great Britain and Ireland. There are also wives who have followed their husbands from Canada to England, and brothers of New Zealand and Australian boys who have been sent straight down from the line. They stay with us as long as the O.C. at the hospital thinks necessary. The patients are not usually told that their relations are coming until they are actually on the spot, and then great are the joys of meeting.” Sometimes visitors have stayed with Miss Brown at the hostel for many weeks, and on one occasion a baby was born there, whose mother had come out to see her badly wounded husband. From time to time there come the tragedies of the relations who arrive too late, and then it is that the ladies of the hostels can comfort and befriend these poor stricken people, go with them to the military funeral, and help them to return to England. Indeed it is mostly sad work, for the relatives are sent for only in the very dangerous cases, and sometimes they stay on through weeks of anguish and suspense; but Miss Brown strives to keep up an atmosphere of cheerfulness and courage, following the wonderful examples from the hospital wards, and there is an unwritten law in the hostel that no one must break down. As an illustration, Miss Brown once described an occasion when she found a girl sobbing bitterly in the hostel sitting-room. On asking what was the matter, she was told that the girl’s brother was to have his foot amputated. “Oh, that’s nothing,” said Miss Brown, and was astonished afterwards, when she had comforted her visitor, at what must have seemed heartlessness on her part; but the loss of a foot is indeed nothing as compared with many cases.