dition; she yields;
and the first "man made of money," who can afford a governess for his
children, cries out against the depravity of the lower orders! And
yet, painful as the condition of the working woman is, it is relatively
fortunate. Should work fail her for one day, two days, what then? Should
sickness come--sickness almost always occasioned by unwholesome food,
want of fresh air, necessary attention, and good rest; sickness, often
so enervating as to render work impossible; though not so dangerous
as to procure the sufferer a bed in an hospital--what becomes of the
hapless wretches then? The mind hesitates, and shrinks from dwelling on
such gloomy pictures.

This inadequacy of wages, one terrible source only of so many evils, and
often of so many vices, is general, especially among women; and, again
this is not private wretchedness, but the wretchedness which afflicts
whole classes, the type of which we endeavor to develop in Mother Bunch.
It exhibits the moral and physical condition of thousands of human
creatures in Paris, obliged to subsist on a scanty four shillings a
week. This poor workwoman, then, notwithstanding the advantages she
unknowingly enjoyed through Agricola's generosity, lived very miserably;
and her health, already shattered, was now wholly undermined by these
constant hardships. Yet, with extreme delicacy, though ignorant of
the little sacrifice already made for her by Agricola, Mother Bunch
pretended she earned more than she really did, in order to avoid offers
of service which it would have pained her to accept, because she knew
the limited means of Frances and her son, and because it would have
wounded her natural delicacy, rendered still more sensitive by so many
sorrows and humiliations.

But, singular as it may appear, this deformed body contained a loving
and generous soul--a mind cultivated even to poetry; and let us add,
that this was owing to the example of Agricola Baudoin, with whom she
had been brought up, and who had naturally the gift. This poor girl was
the first confidant to whom our young mechanic imparted his literary
essays; and when he told her of the charm and extreme relief he found
in poetic reverie, after a day of hard toil, the workwoman, gifted with
strong natural intelligence, felt, in her turn, how great a resource
this would be to her in her lonely and despised condition.

One day, to Agricola's great surprise, who had just read some verses to
her, the sewing-