for more, they are all around me! And my dipsomaniac friends
have come too! I hear them talking and arguing, when a strident
voice calls out, "No arguing! no arguing! argument spoils
everything!" and Jane stops the talk of others by occupying the
platform herself and recites a chapter from the book of Job. I
am living it all over again!

And now troop in my suffering friends. Here is the paralysed
woman of thirty-five who has for twenty years lain in bed the
whiles her sister has worked incessantly to maintain her! Here
is my widow friend who after working fifteen hours daily for
years was dragged from the Lea. As she sits and listens her
hands are making matchboxes and throwing them over her shoulder,
one, two, three, four! right, left! they go to the imaginary
heaps upon the imaginary beds. While blighted children are
crawling upon the floor looking up at me with big eyes. Here is
my patient old friend who makes "white flowers" although she is
eighty years of age, and still keeps at it, though, thank God,
she gets the old-age pension.

Now come in the young men and maidens, the blighted blossoms of
humanity who wither and die before the time of fruition, for that
fell disease consumption has laid its deadly hand upon them.

Oh! the mystery of it all, the sorrow and madness of it all! I
open my door and they file out. Some back to the unseen world,
some back to the lower depths of this world! Surely they are a
motley lot, are my friends and acquaintances; they are as varied
as humanity itself. So they represent to me all the moods and
tenses of humanity, all its personal, social and industrial