Eight district clergymen take more or less part
in the finding of fit persons to help, and the
bringing of fit help to them, but the clergy have
no sort of control over the charity, which is free
as the gentle rain to freshen where it falls. The
Sewing School is for the help of in-door and of
out-door workers. It is not a school for the
training of young girls to the bad business of
needlewomen; on the contrary, it very carefully
avoids doing that.

In-doors its school-girls are old girls who have,
many of them, grandchildren, and who are
recommended by want and a good character to
the opportunity of here spending a profitable
afternoon, from half-past one till five o'clock, in
earning what they can. They get in winter a
good meal of soup and bread before they begin
work, and in summer stay for tea and bread and
butter, and have a lump of bread to carry home
after their work is done. They need not be good
or bad needlewomen when they come for such
help; they are taught, if necessary, by their good
shepherds Watchful and Sincere (the manager's
wife and sister) how to earn something every
week for their own sustenance in aid of the poor
family at home. Married women, too, may come
and learn how to stitch well if they do not already
know. The school does not open till half-past one,
so that they cannot come till they have done
their morning duties in the house, and seen to
the dinner of their husbands and children. That
done, they may come into the tent of the good
shepherds, and by a few hours' needlework help
to pay for the scanty comforts of those whom
they cherish. They are paid according to the
quantity of work they do, but when they are
infirm with age and dim of sight, they are paid
by the hour. What it is meant to give is Help,
and while great care is taken that no sort of
help shall be a substitute for proper industry
ana individual exertion, no wall of formal rule
is suffered to part a true need from the touch of
sympathy.

Out of doors the Sewing School gives work
to be done by poor women who bring from some
respectable person written security for work
entrusted to them. Having shown by stitching
a sample in the sewing-room that they can work
well enough to content the government inspectors
of shirts, whom Brown's-lane has to satisfy,
they are allowed to take out six or twelve shirts
at a time, are paid for them by ones or twos, or
as they will, whenever they bring them back,
and when alterations are found necessary are
not sent empty away, but are allowed to sit
down in the sewing-room and make their work
right on the spot. Needles are sold to them at
wholesale prices; cottons and other requisites
are given to them free. The work given is only
shirt-making, and no other than that furnished
by part of the government contract for making
the shirts of our soldiers and sailors. There are
regulation quality of material, and a regulation
make, so strictly preserved, that a shirt will be
rejected for a broken thread in its calico, or for
a quarter of an inch too much or too little of
gathers in the making, or for a drop of oil from
the sewing-machine on any part of it. The price
paid at Number Seven, Brown's-lane, for the
hand-stitching of such a shirt is fivepence-
halfpenny, but that is not for the whole making. It
is already more than the ghost of a shirt before
it comes into the hands of the needlewoman,
every part being ready cut and prepared, and its
main parts already put together by the sewing-
machine. Thus, at fivepence-halfpenny for the
making of each shirt so fully prepared, there is
one industrious woman of forty, with a sickly
husband and two daughters, one of whom helps
her a little, who can make half a dozen shirts a
day, and is now generally earning fifteen shillings
a week. She began at the Sewing School as a
slow worker, and now makes the highest rate of
earnings. The average is seven or eight shillings;
but this is very commonly money earned in the
intervals of household duty, that makes in a
poor home the difference between hard want and
a sufficient living. About five hundred women
are in the course of a year helped in this way at
Number Seven, Brown's-lane, the number of
workers thus employed at one time being about
sixty in-doors and two hundred out of doors.

On the first floor we find some of the sixty
busy on wristbands, and other mysteries too
deep for the masculine intellect. Here is a
grandmother, ever garrulous of her soldier son,
whose life was miraculously saved in some
battle of a yet further East than this. She has
a picture of the battle, and an ever-welling
memory of the great mercy that spared to her her
boy. And so, among- the fellow-strugglers with
herself in their own battle of the east, she talks
of a far war, all forgetting that which is near
to them, that in which they have themselves
struggled and been trampled down, and raised
again, and carried for the healing of their
wounds into the cool and pleasant tent of the
good shepherds. "It is so pleasant to come
here," says a worker dim of eye, "for all the
while we are here we never hear a sound of
anger." Ah, the relief from the chiding in the
dark dens of that giant Despair, from whom
they are rescued! The grating cry of the
impatient sufferer, the shriek of the child struck
by the hungry mother, who has been for a vain
solace to the gin-shop, the bared passions, the
naked vice that brawls and curses in the street
before the window of the quietest in those chill
homes, the never silent roaring of Apollyon!
One who knew nothing of the life thus
comforted, might not have guessed how prominent a
charm would be the mere peace and quiet of the
tent on the Delectable Mountain.

Quiet! Well, that exists only metaphorically
on the top floor, where are the sewing-machines,
one of them Thomas's, and if that particular
machine cannot thrash wheat as well as stitch,
it ought to do so, for the noise, as of a great
thrashing, that it makes. The sewing-machine
is establishing itself as a benefactor at the East
End of the town. It is a benefactor, first, because
a young woman at a sewing-machine can earn
almost twice as much as she can with a needle;
secondly, because there is an amount of general