make boots, perhaps for the servants and sailor-
boys who also come to Number Seven, Brown's-
lane, for their outfit. For when a poor girl,
recommended by a clergyman as "deserving and
needy," has obtained her first place as a servant,
she may have given to her at Brown's-lane an
outfit of dresses and under-clothing, shawl and
bonnet, stockings, boots, bedgowns, aprons, and
caps, that enables her to present herself in a fit
manner to her employers. The clothes thus
given are made in that same tent on the Delectable
Mountain, and three hundred such outfits
have been given within the last two or three
years. With a like liberality poor and deserving
boys receive gifts of the outfit necessary for
their proper entrance into the Merchant Service.
For the Royal Navy, few lads in this poverty-
stricken district are tall enough or stout enough.

Then there are within the tent stores of
"maternity boxes" for the lending of all needful
things to distressed women about to become
mothers; and five hundred blankets under
which every winter their bodies lie warm. They
are lent when winter is setting in, and are
returned clean some time in May.

If we go from the house to the little homes
of the poor whom it comforts, we may the more
clearly see the worth of its work. Here are
some cases from the experience of one of the
district clergy: A man, eighty-five years old, has
been married for more than half a century to the
wife who, now that the grown-up children have
left the nest, is his only companion. They want
food, and even clothing; they have sold their
bed to pay their rent, and they owe rent.
Brown's-lane knows that they have done their
share of labour in this world, and are entitled
now to sympathy and solace, and Brown's-lane
gave them all last winter what was necessary
to their health and comfort. Old people in
seasons of distress are thus saved from the
workhouse, the scraps of furniture, of which
the oldest may have in their little household
the most sacred memories—the sampler worked
by the girl who is their child-daughter in heaven,
the little chair in which she sat, the patchwork
quilt that granny made when she was young,
and grandfather was courting her—these things
are saved to them, and their own lives also are
sustained. The mortality among the aged in the
one parish, of which records are before us, was
last winter lessened so considerably, that only
two of the number died. A whole family was
fever-stricken; the father and two children were
taken to the workhouse, the mother and two
children were left in the poor and dirty home.
From Number Seven, Brown's-lane, meat, and
wine, and whitewash came; the father returned
convalescent. Meat and wine were still
supplied; every life was saved, and the family is
now well, and earning without help its own
scanty living. A poor weaver, with a wife and
five children, failed in eyesight; meat and wine
gave him his sight again, and to the help given
while he was unable to work was added the
finding for him of work more suited to his
physical condition. He has now begun the
world afresh, and prospers. Here, again, says
the record, sustained help is brought to an aged
couple, whose united earnings are five shillings a
week. The old man has been run over, and is
deaf. Here, again, help is given to a widowed
grandmother, who lives with a widowed
daughter, both trying in vain to get bread,
shelter, and clothing, as washerwomen. Here
it is help to a poor old widow, who is dependent
on a sickly son. And here, again, the help is to
a wife with a bad husband, who has left her and
her family to starve, or to a wife and children
where the bread-winner is lately dead, or lamed
by an accident. A man who could find no work
was set to the repair of bedsteads, and other
necessary articles that he found broken and
useless, and in this way were restored comfort
and tidiness to the homes of twenty families, at
a total cost of two pounds twelve and sevenpence-
halfpenny for labour and material.

If we leave the tent of the four shepherds,
and, still on the Delectable Mountain, travel
homeward by way of Columbia-square, built
by Miss Coutts to provide cheap, wholesome,
and comfortable homes for two hundred families,*
we may glance also at the market which the
same lady is causing to rise by its side, for
bringing into the district—with which she has
no tie but that of human sympathy—plenty of
good food at the fairest market prices. We
might turn aside, also, to look at the Ragged
School that stands near by to feed the starved
minds of the children. But it is more than an
afternoon's work to see all that a wise head and
munificent hand, prompted by a warm and
sympathising heart, has been for months and years
maturing for the wretchedest end of London.

* See vol. vii., page 301.

Let Number Seven, Brown's-lane, be recognised
—now that winter, always hard and biting
to the poor, approaches—as an example of what
one head can effect for a whole district. Once
established, the working details are not difficult
to carry out, nor more expensive (being partly
self-supporting) than lie within the scope of
much less affluence than the means with which
Miss Coutts is blessed—and blesses. The
example of that lady, who originates this practical
mode of uniting charity with profitable work,
is always a safe one to follow in good deeds of a
like kind.

A BOARD OF GREEN CLOTH.

CHAPTER I. OUR HOTEL.

CHARLES LAMB gossips in his delightful and
fanciful way upon the names of Books, showing
how certain authors' names seem to bring up with
them a sort of fragrance, or even music. He
instances Kit, Marlowe, Drummond of
Hawthornden, and some more. Had the same vein
pursued him, had he loved Fleet-street less and
travelling more, and ever have found himself as
I find myself now, under the white curtains of
a very white window in a very white room,
looking on the cheerful gardens of our