the bell. She rings once and again, and at length the door porter
appears, accompanied by a person holding a situation under the
guardians--his name is Brooke--and he is a policeman. She is
starving, she is pregnant, and almost in the pains of labour, but the
stern officials will not take her in. Why? Because she had been in
the workhouse until Tuesday morning last, and had then been
discharged by 'order of the guardians.' Nor is this all. The tale of
parochial bounty is not yet half told out. During that long wet
Tuesday she wandered about. She had not a friend in this great town
to whom she could apply for the smallest assistance, and on Tuesday
night she came back to implore once more the kindly shelter of the
parish workhouse. For yet that night she was taken in, but the next
morning cast forth into the world again with a piece of dry bread in
her hand. On Wednesday the same scene was renewed--the same fruitless
casting about for food and shelter, the same disappointment, and the
same despair. But parochial bounty can only go thus far, and no
farther. Charity herself was worn out with the importunity of this
persevering pauper, and on Thursday night the doors of the parish
workhouse were finally and sternly shut in her face.

"But she was not alone in her sufferings. You might have supposed
that the misery of London--enormous as the amount of London misery
undoubtedly is--could have shown no counterpart to the frightful
position of this unfortunate creature--without a home, without a
friend, without a character, without a shelter, without a bite of
food--betrayed by her seducer, and the mark for the last twelve hours
of the floodgates of heaven. * * * Can it be there are two of them?
Yes! Another young woman, precisely in the same situation, knocks at
the same workhouse door, and is refused admittance by the same stern
guardians of the ratepayers' pockets. The two unfortunates club their