en an exhibition prepared by the club of foods and food-products, pure
and adulterated. This exhibition had been attended by thousands of
housekeepers and by a few men, and had served to awaken a semblance of
interest in the question of pure food.

When Gertrude was fairly installed in office, the Reverend Martha
Kendall had called at City Hall and laid before the Mayor a definite
plan, the result of which was that the woman minister was made Inspector
of Markets, there being such an office provided for in the old City
Charter, although it had remained a dead letter on the books. And no
sooner did the Reverend Martha Kendall receive her appointment than she
went to the club and asked to have a special committee appointed from
that organization to work with her for clean markets and pure food.

When the women of any city show beyond question that they want pure
food--or any other definite thing--they are going to get it, and without
delay. Although there was some grumbling among the marketmen, the
provision stores were soon put through such a course of scrubbing and
whitening as to make the old-fashioned "spring house-cleaning," which
has been the bugbear of _pater familias_ and one of the chief assets of
the paragrapher for so many years, a process of incomparably mild
flavor. At the abattoir it had not been so easy to effect a reform, but
with such women as Mrs. Bateman, Mrs. Albert Turner and the Reverend
Martha Kendall coming down there to inspect and to demand cleanliness
and wholesome conditions, the butchers who shone before the public as
"wholesale meat producers" did not dare to refuse the improvements asked
for; so that by the time the grand jury began to look into the methods
of the aldermen with the street railway system, there were both friends
and enemies of the new administration ready to take a hand, if
necessary.

Then, too, there were the men who owned, and the men who ran, the
questionable resorts; the gambling dens; the saloons; the houses of
which good women are popularly supposed to know nothing. All of these
had been problems which Gertrude had been thinking about and planning
for, before her election was settled. These matters she had talked over
with few, if any, of her advisers; for she had her own ideas--or perhaps
her father's. When she was fairly established in the Mayor's chair she
had appointed a reliable man as police commissioner--one who would carry
out her plans. There were no spectac