they had a second room, yet had not the decency to use it. "De mortuis
nil nisi bonum." They lived according to their light; but they had very
little light, literally or figuratively. Surely we want to teach our
poor the simple rules of hygiene. One of the gossips, a clean, healthy
little woman, with a fine baby at her breast, referred with pride to her
poor kitchen, identical in all respects, save dirt, with the home.

Then, again, there was one thing that struck me forcibly, and that was
the sort of qualified reprobation with which these good gossips--really
decent people in their way--spoke of the habit of throwing knives.
Honora had once thrown one at her daughter of eighteen, but never meant
to do so again. And all this under the bells of the old parish church of
Greenwich in the year of grace 1870!

Clearly, however, the first question is what to do with the boy, aet.
twelve. Comporting himself as he did in the face of the awful tragedy he
had caused, this young gentleman must clearly not be lost sight of, or
it will be the worse for himself and those with whom he is brought into
contact. Nay, in a few years, he will become a centre of influence, and
radiate around him another such "home," worse, perhaps, than the first.

Let our Social Science so far break through the programme it may have
laid down as to touch on this very appropriate subject of squalid homes,
and its next sitting may be a very useful one indeed.

CHAPTER XX.

BATHING IN THE FAR EAST.

Visions of Oriental splendour and magnificence float across the
imagination at the mere mention of the storied East. Soaring above all
the routine of ordinary existence and the commonplaces of history, that
creative faculty within us pictures Pactolus with its golden sands; or
recalls from the legendary records of childhood the pomp of Aladdin's
Princess going to her luxurious bath; or brings back to mind the almost
prosaic minuteness with which the Greek poet describes the bath of
Ulysses when he returned from his wanderings. In the East the bath has
ever been an institution--not merely a luxury, but a necessity; and it
is a proof of the eclectic tendencies of our generation that we have
domesticated here in the West that great institution, the Hammam, or
Turkish bath, which the Romans were wise enough to adopt, after their
Eastern experience, more than two thousand years ago. Of none of these
Oriental splendours, however, has the present narrative