“Somewhere in England” Mrs. Black, when her country took up arms in 1914, was as anxious and concerned as you are to-day. Her man was a car-cleaner who earned 22 shillings a week on the Great Western Railway. That seems appallingly little from our point of view. But thousands of British working class families were accustomed to living on such a wage. The Blacks had to. It is true there wasn’t much margin for joy in it. And when the call to the colours came, it was to Mr. Black an invitation to a Great Adventure. He enlisted. Well, the first winter had not passed before it was demonstrated that Mrs. Black and the children—there were five of them—were not going to experience any new hardship because of the absence of the head of the family in Flanders. By January she was saying hopefully one morning across the fence to her neighbour in the next little smoke-coloured brick house in the long dingy row: “If them that’s makin’ this war’ll only keep it up long enough, I’ll be on my feet again.” To-day you may say that Mrs. Black is “on her feet.” There are Nottingham lace curtains at her front windows as good as any in the whole row of Lamson’s Walk. The new chest of drawers she’s needed ever since she was married is a place to put the children’s clothes. And it’s such a help to keeping the three rooms tidy. Santa Claus came at Christmas with a graphophone. And you ought to see Mrs. Black’s fur coat! Three other women who haven’t got theirs yet were in the night she wore it home “just to feel the softness of it.” Their hands, do you know, hands that are hard and grimy with England’s black town soot, had never so much as touched fur before! And they’re going to wear it soon, if this war keeps up. For they’re all of them these new women in industry, like Mrs. Black.