"Usual thing. Got into trouble at her situation in London; the man promised to marry her, but he kept putting it off, and then one day he disappeared, and wrote to her from Glasgow saying that he was a married man. She came back home, but her father drove her out with blows and curses, and she walked here from Kingsford--goodness knows how. It is a sad case, and the relieving officer tells me she will probably not be able to get any affiliation order enforced, as the man has evaded liability by going to Scotland." "Abominable!" said the doctor; then he went towards the bedside of his patient, felt her pulse, glanced at the temperature chart, and his face grew grave. Taking the babe from the cradle, he laid it beside the mother: "You have a pretty little girl." The eyelids flickered, and, as the Countess had spoken, so spoke the pauper: "God help her!" "He will," said the doctor, who was a religious man. "He didn't help me. He let me come to this, and I was born respectable. She is only a little come-by-chance maid." "Cheer up, my lass! My wife will help you: she knows it has not been your fault." The doctor gave a few directions, and then left, looking puzzled and worried. He was a good _accoucheur_, and hated to lose a case. What was the matter with the women that they seemed to have lost the will to live? * * * * * Three days later, in the glory of the May sunshine, there was a double funeral in Castleton churchyard. ON THE PERMANENT LIST (1905) Now also when I am old and grey-headed, O God, forsake me not. "Spend but a few days in the police-court," says Juvenal, "and then call yourself an unhappy man if you dare." Had he sat on a Board of Guardians, he would doubtless have included that also as a school of personal contentment. All sorts of griefs and tragedies are brought up before us, some of them abnormal and Theban in horror, some of them so common that we seem to hear them unmoved: an honest man who cannot find employment, women with unborn babes kicked, starved, and deserted, children neglected or tortured, poor human beings marred in the making, the crippled, the diseased, the defective physically and mentally, too often the pitiful scapegoats for the sins of the race. All these things seem too terrible for words or tears; it is the cheeriness and humour of the poor, their pluck and endurance, their kindness and generosity one to another, that bring a lump to the throat and a dimness to the eyes.