six persons concerned, and four
marriages and four divorces had taken place. A baby had arrived on the
scene, but its parentage was a mystery in the mix-up.

It is quite usual for a woman to be divorced before the birth of her
first child, and we could not but feel sympathy with the poor young
mother who under such circumstances called her baby "Vengeance."

Love, the best and most holy of human joys, has been almost strangled to
death in Egypt by the institution of divorce, and the family can seldom
be considered a community of common interest. As one woman was heard to
say, "We go on the principle of trying to pluck or fleece our husbands
all we can while we have the chance, since we never know how soon we may
be divorced."

It has been said that the character of a nation cannot rise above the
character of its women. What can be expected of a nation when hate and
jealousy are the ruling passions of its women, of its mothers who
nurture and train up its young!

The question has been asked what is the condition of the children of
divorced parents. According to the law the mother is given an allowance
by her former husband on which to bring up their children to a certain
age; then they are his. If they are girls they often are allowed to
become servants to the mother's successor, although there are fathers
who do have enough natural affection to give the daughters of a former
wife the proper place in the house. The allowance given a divorced woman
when she has children is most often a mere pittance and too often she
never gets one at all. She marries again and the children live with
grandparents or other near relations or even alternate between the
houses of the remarried father and mother, thus becoming mere little
street waifs who have no definite abiding place. They certainly do
suffer from neglect, but seldom are they victims of deliberate cruelty,
although such cases are not unheard of.

The distressing screams of a child once attracted the attention of a
family; on investigation it was discovered that the Mohammedan neighbor,
who had just brought home a new wife encumbered with her little
four-year-old daughter, had been cruelly ill-treating the little mite by
shutting her in a dark cellar for hours at a time.

The moral effect of divorce on the children is very bad. They often seem
to have an inborn passion of hatred and jealousy. The head mistress of a
school for girls said she had often noticed how little