after the thing has lasted some time, a considerable
amount of principle and self-sacrifice. Not
less so does the abandonment by ladies of their
household functions, and their homes, to spend
the day among hundreds of factory women and
girls, who require incessant superintendence and
advice while they pursue their unaccustomed
labours.

He who will rise betimes in the morning, and
betake him to the Friends' Soup-kitchen, Bale-
street, Manchester, at about half-past seven A.M.,
will be well repaid for his trouble. He will have
time to look over the place and see what preparations
are making for the eight o'clock distribution
of soup. He will have time to visit the
upper room, where are the capacious boilers in
which the soup is made; and the room below,
where are the great wooden troughs into which
the soup descends when made, and from which
it is ladled out to the applicants as they
come up in line. It will be seen, too, that
an excellent system has been adopted for
keeping the crowd of applicants in order—
a system of barricades and zig-zags extending
over a considerable space of ground, and for
which, indeed, there is urgent necessity. For
small and feeble are some of those who come in
search of this supply of nourishment—women,
old and young, little girls and boys and mere
children. Hunger makes people impatient and
unruly, and many of these poor frail
creatures would come to harm if this plan of
protection were wanting. There is an air of a
French theatre about these zig-zags and the
crowds waiting in them. A very false air it
is though, and the poor pinched, hungry,
tattered creatures who stand there wobegone, and
silent, form a great contrast in one's memory
to that other barricaded crowd of the Boulevard,
full of excitement and eager anticipation
of amusement, and bandying jokes with
one another in the fulness of their exuberant
glee.

At eight o'clock the soup is discharged out of
the coppers in the room above, into the troughs
in the room below; it comes down a sort of
fireman's hose, and is thick and strong and
fiercely hot and very comfortable. Then the
door that leads to the barricades is opened, and
in the people rush, stimulated by the smell,
no doubt, and with eager and devouring
looks. It is a terrible sight. They all stare
so. The children are so old. They watch the
splashes which are lost to them, as the good-
natured people at the troughs ladle the soup
into the vessels which the candidates bring.
Good measure is given, but still the very
splashes are stared after, in an eager way.
Each man, or woman, or child, brings a card,
on which is inscribed the amount of soup to
which he or she is entitled, as a member
of a large or small household. The quantity
is given to the last drop, and many a jolly
encouraging word into the bargain. The little
pinched old man who brings a coffee-pot to
carry away his soup in, does not care much,
though, for such amenities. It is the soup he
cares for. Here is a little bit of a face growing
into the same lines as fast as it can. It is
the face of a very little child, but a business-
like child, and a child who could not be
defrauded, even if such a thing were attempted,
of so much as an egg-cupful of the precious
liquor. She has brought a smooth jug without
a handle, or anything to hold it by; it is filled
with soup, and is scalding hot. What will
she do? She has got to lift it down from a
high place, and carry it away. I should not
have known what to do with that slippery and
scalding jug without a handle. But the child,
precocious from poverty, set it down upon
the ground, and straightway spread out by the
side of it a poor rough cloth. This she
produced from some place of concealment, placed
the jug in the middle of the cloth, bringing
the ends up over the top of it, tying them
together by the four corners; and our poor little
soul was from that moment mistress of the
situation.

What wonderful vessels, and what hidden
capacity of adaptation in those vessels, came to
light that morning! There was no end to the
varieties of pan and pot brought by the poor
people. We have seen that a coffee-pot was a
difficult thing to fill with a very large ladle, but
it was not so difficult as to get the soup into a
tin-canister made for holding tea or other dry
goods, and having quite a small mouth. Somehow
or other even this was filled, and a small
eleemosynary drop added to allow for spillings.
Broken washing-jugs, tin pails with handles,
ordinary wooden buckets, appeared on every
side, and sometimes a poor woman would
appear with a quantity of small vessels in which
to receive her allowance, having no one large
receptacle that would hold it all. Children
would stop when they got outside the kitchen,
and, kneeling or sitting on the pavement, would
take a saucer-full to keep them going, while
here and there a young fellow or two would be
found in a doorway, or standing against a
window, eating his breakfast out-of-doors, with his
basin of soup on the window-sill and a slice of
bread in his hand. The soup is so hot that
some of it is packed up in tin-cans and sent to
places a dozen miles away for distribution. It
is as hot as the people can swallow when it gets
to its journey's end.

There are other articles of food distributed.
In all the towns in which the relief system is
established, there are regular depôts where
bread in goodly two-pound and four-pound
loaves, meal, and groceries, are given out
at regular times in enormous quantities. As in
the distributing of soup, great method and
order prevail: the whole thing being so ably
organised that as many as four or five hundred
claimants will be relieved in the course of an
hour. It is impossible not to be struck by
the cheerful aspect the people wear, by the
good face they put upon their troubles, and
the hopeful way in which they talk of them.
At Rochdale, a woman, coming for her Dole,
had a baby about a year old in her arms.