sister. She lived to be a happy wife and
mother; she married my sister's son, who
succeeded poor Meltham; she is living now; and
her children ride about the garden on my walking-
stick, when I go to see her.

NEEDLEWOMAN'S HALL.

OF the grown-up unmarried women in this
country, three out of four; of the widows, two in
three; of the wives, a seventh part, earn their
bread by their labour. Of these working women,
nearly half a million live by the needle, and one-
half of that number can only live at all by working
twelve or sixteen hours a day.

The wretched earnings of the needle are, of
course, to be ascribed to the excessive supply of
workers, and the helplessness that urges
thousands of them to work for any payment that will
keep body and soul together. But the low
payment of piece-work compels hasty production,
and the good needlework in which a well-trained
housewife takes delight, cannot be executed by
the fingers urged by the fear that sixteen hours
of work may fail to get over eighteenpenny-
worth of pay.

We speak of skill in the mere act of sewing,
quite apart from the sublime science of millinery.
Few needlewomen can afford themselves the time
to cultivate such skill, yet very many happy wives
who are themselves able to sew with deliberation,
and delight in the perfection of their own
work, can appreciate its value. Thousands of
ladies are desiring in vain to know where they
can find women who might come to the house of
an employer, or take work to their own rooms
and put into it stitchery that is all ornament
and strength. Ladies are not, we think,
unwilling to understand that skilled work is entitled
to a price high in proportion to its rarity. But
where is it to be found? Where is the careful
housewife to look, in such a great bottle
of hay as London, for example, when she wants
to find the needle that wm serve her turn?
Wanted, a Needlewoman's Hall.

A great and, for the present, necessary burden
under which the needlewoman lies, is the
necessity of taking shopwork from the hands of
agents or sub-agents, and paying them a serious
per-centage of risk money from their wretched
earnings. The tradesman requires security for
the material he sends out to be made; the needlewoman
herself has none but her character to
offer. Therefore, a more substantial middleman
steps in to take from the tradesman his material
and make himself responsible for its return cut
and stiiched into a certain number of garments,
at a stipulated price for each. This man employs
the needlewomen, or perhaps sublets part of his
contract to others who employ them, and, for the
risk of the guarantee, as well as for the profits
of the occupation he has taken on himself, the
price paid to the needlewoman for her work is
made very decidedly to differ from the price paid
for it by the person who first gave it out. The
deduction is most serious to a class that is
obliged to know how—and does know how—to
do more with an odd sixpence a week than
perhaps any other class of beings upon earth. The
tradesman cannot be expected to make weekly
distribution of material upon a large scale, to a
crowd of poor and suffering women whom he
does not know, depending upon nothing but the
principles of human nature for his surety. The
agency is unavoidable at present; although its
abolition, if it could be got rid of, would close
a paltry way of money-making, with which men
could very well dispense. Wanted, a Needle-
woman's Hall.

The want is, of a point of immediate
contact between the whole body of the honest
needlewomen in a town, and the whole body
of the public. We cannot alter the main
principles of trade, to raise the needlewoman's
profits, but we can study those accidents of her
condition which deprive her of the whole advantage
to be had of patient industry. If only a
little money given by the rich, will set up a
machinery that shall secure permanently for some
of the hardest and the worst rewarded workers
in the land, most of them helpless single women,
a condition permanently raised above its present
level, let the fact be shown, and the help may
be looked for, confidently.

A small beginning has been established this
year in London: it is the Institution for
the Employment of Needlewomen, Number
Twenty-six, Lamb's Conduit-street. This
institution may be taken as the germ of
Needlewoman's Hall. It is quite modest in its
pretension, but quite capable of developing its
mustard-seed into a mustard-tree, if benignant
showers shall prosper it. The founder of
it, is a lady who had been drawn from one
spectacle of sorrow to another, into a genuine
examination of the state of the different classes
of Our Homeless Poor, and who, under that
title, told what she had seen of the condition of
poor women in London, in a little book
published by Messrs. Nisbet, of Berners-street.
For example, a poor widow came with her two
little boys in the "slack season" of needlework,
to the Refuge at Field-lane. Eager to return
to honest independence, she was started on her
own account in a bare room, and obtained the
loan of a chaff bed and bolster. What sum
would suffice to furnish her with necessaries?
Half-a-crown was all she borrowed for the
purpose. She hunted up a chair with three legs
and no back, which she could have for threepence,
and she knew a carpenter who had a spare leg
of a chair. In the same spirit she made successful
search for all her other furniture; found
a table, a cup, a saucer, a plate, a kettle and so
forth; leaving fivepence of surplus when her
furniture had all been bought. The fivepence she,
with all simplicity of heart, carried back to her
benefactor.

At Number Twenty-six, Lamb's Conduit-
street, the upper part of a house has been taken;
one or two sensible and active ladies manage the
affairs; but there is an ornamental committee,
and there is a sufficiency of episcopal and noble
patrons to attract that part of the public which