bodily exercise at this work, which makes the
women employed at sewing-machines healthier
than those who live by their needle; and thirdly,
because, although it gets through the work of
many persons while only employing one, it can,
as we see at Number Seven, Brown's-lane, be
so used in the preparation of handwork as to
improve very sensibly the earnings of hand-
workers who labour in subordination to it. Its
tendency is thus to revive, with new and wholesome
sap, a sickly, overgrown, and almost
poisonous calling. One of the sewing-machines at
Brown's-lane prepares in a day five dozen shirts
for the makers; but what one person with
machine help thus prepares, it takes eighteen or
twenty to make up. Even where there are
middlemen to profit by the labour of the poor,
the sewing-machine has bettered the old wages
of slopwork, upon whicli there are still women
wearing themselves in the old way by endless
hours of ill-paid labour, hungry and sleepless,
to the grave. Number Seven, Brown's-lane,
does not, on the other hand, compete with the
fair trader in any way. It is managed like any
other workshop, and is made to yield a profit,
even on the minimum prices paid by government,
whose work it only undertakes.

On this top floor, in a room next to that
wherein the sewing-machines work, the cutting
out is done, under particular superintendence of
the shepherds or shepherdesses Watchful and
Sincere. It is a matter of no small consequence
to have the right way of exact and simultaneous
cutting of the divers round, and square, and
otherwise complex pieces, that when put
together make a shirt. It was said that it could
be done only on any considerable scale for the
saving of time with a costly piece of machinery.
But, like a thousand problems of society said to
be solvable only by help of the most ingenious
apparatus of wheels within wheels, the thing to
be done and the easiest way of doing it had only
to be clearly seen and heartily gone into, to be
achieved by the most unpretending of all
agencies. For when Sincere gave her mind
even to the cutting out question, she very soon
found that the thing required could be done
perfectly with no more complex machinery than
a long knife and a slit or two in an old kitchen
table. That is pretty much the general
experience of life. Sincere is the great
simplifier.

Now, if it be nearly five o'clock, and we come
down stairs from the top to the bottom, we shall
find at the foundation of the house a kitchen,
that, before Number Seven was taken for its
present purpose, had been used as a great dust-
hole, and was full of rottenness, that sent a
steam of death up through the house. It was a
typical change that transformed this den of
corruption into the well-swept kitchen, with its
genial fire alight, a mighty can of tea brewing
upon the hearth, and sending up a steam of
health, sixty mugs on the table waiting to be
filled, and on a side-table bread in abundance
to be eaten, and also to be carried out for help
to the sustenance of other homes. We taste of
the good brew and go up again into the little
office by the entrance door.

Two women are there, each with a bit of
paper in her hand. They are district nurses,
paid chiefly by the Institution for Nursing
Sisters in Devonshire-square, and partly by the
clergy in whose parishes they visit. The papers in
their hands are lists, each with about a score of
names of sufferers, the fever smitten, the palsied,
the bedridden, the women who lie with young
infants freshly born into a home of want. They
bring their daily lists into the tent of the good
shepherds, to whose charge also is given that
they entertain the sick and suffering among
the poor with meat and wine. A ticket for a
shilling's-worth of meat may look like a commonplace
document; but in the haunts of poverty
the most illegible and complex physician's
prescription, bristling with cabalistic signs and
abbreviated pestle-Latin, sinks low in comparison
with this:

Recipe,—
           Rumpsteak, one pound.
Cook.
          To be eaten directly.

As for the wine, here it is in cask as imported;
a strong and sweet white wine, and a pure
Bordeaux, topped by a cask of good brandy.
The poor also owe thanks to Mr. Gladstone for
the cheap and wholesome varieties of pure light
wine that he has enabled them to bring to the
sick-bed in place of the old doctored port and
sherry that were only one degree less noxious
than the most part of the apothecary's physic.
We hope to see the system of administering
relief through the agency of out-door nurses
paid out of the parish rates, widely adopted.

If we could have three wishes for the poorest
people of the East, the wishes might well be for
Meat and Wine and Whitewash. And even for
the whitewash there is thought taken at Number
Seven, Brown's-lane. In times when work is
hard to get, the unemployed and partially
employed men of the surrounding district are there
provided with the means of keeping their home
standing till the better day arrives. Only under
exceptional conditions is a whole day's work
given to any able-bodied man. Were that done
there would be interference with the natural
and healthy stimulus to seek work in the
ordinary way. But if a poor man cannot get a day's
work, he may do half a day's work for Number
Seven, from half-past one to eight o'clock, and
be sure of a shilling if a single man, or eighteen-
pence if married; in this, as in every case, the
condition of help being that the applicant is
"needy and deserving." If no other work can
be found him, he is sent to carry the free
ministrations of the whitewash pail to homes that
need and will accept them, is set to paper rooms,
repair the broken table, mend the window
through which the wind whistles contempt of
want, make a roof weather-tight, or help keep
in repair the churches of the district. Small
orders for work are also given to men partially
employed: the rug-weaver is set to work upon
a hearth-rug, the starving shoemaker is set to