"Look away! Get the sense of it all," said a brisk voice behind me—a voice I knew well as that of one who gave days, and often nights, to work in these very streets. "Did you see that tall woman with the big basket and a face like a chimney-swallow? She runs a boarding-house 'round on Madison street, and this is the stuff she feeds them on. Poor wretch! She has a drunken husband and three drinking sons. She means well, would like to do better by her boarders, but there is rent and gas and wear and tear of all sorts, and she buys bob veal and stale fish and rotten vegetables and alum bread, trying to make the ends meet. I've been there and tasted the messes that come to her table, and I would drink too if forced to live on them. She's got sense, a little—enough not to fly in a rage when I told her the food was enough to make a drunkard of every man in the house. 'I can't help it,' she said, crying. 'I've only just so much money, and the girl spoils most of what I do get.'—'Cook yourself,' I said.—'I can't,' she answered: 'I don't know any better than the girl. I'll do anything you say.' I am not a cook: I could not tell her anything. 'Go to cooking-school,' I said: 'it'll pay you.'—'I've neither time nor money,' she said; and there it ended. What's to be done? I've just come round the market. It is dinner-time, and I think every other man was eating pie. The same money might have bought him a bowl of strong soup or a plate of savory and nourishing stew, if there had been anybody with sense enough to provide it. Up and down, in and out, wherever I go, I see that cooks are the missionaries needed. Come in here a moment."
I followed up the steps of a "Home" for sailors, planned to give them a refuge from the traps known as "sailors' boarding-houses." The long dining-room we entered was spotlessly clean, and some thirty men were dining. I looked for a moment as my friend spoke with some one sitting at the head of the table, then passed out.
"You saw," he said, "plenty of food, and all clean as a whistle, but what sort? Steak fried to a crisp, soggy potatoes, underdone cabbage and pork, bread rank with alum, and coffee whose only merit is warmth. Those men are filled, but not fed. The bread alone is condensed dyspepsia. In an hour the weaker stomachs will have what they call 'a goneness.' They will crave something, and poor R—— will have half a dozen of them half drunk or wholly so on his hands by night. He will pray and exhort, and bundle them up to the Mission if he can, and cry as he tells me how they will give way and yield to the devil whether or no. And so it goes. Women must get hold of this thing. It's the first item in your temperance crusade, and till the people have better food there is no law or influence that can make them give up drinking. I wouldn't if I were they."
Here the talk ended. My impetuous friend disappeared around a corner, and I went my way, a little surer than before of the fact which was already so distinct a belief it needed no new foundations, that better food will and must mean better living. Hard times are passing, but none the less is there still the imperative demand for wider knowledge of what food those hard-earned dollars shall buy. Philanthropists may urge what reforms they will—less crowding, purer air, better sanitary regulations—but this question of food underlies all. The knowledge that is broad enough to ensure good food is broad enough to mean better living in all ways; and not till such knowledge is the property of all women can we look for the "emancipation" from some of the deepest evils that curse the life of woman in the slums and out. Toward that end all women who long to help, yet see no outlook, may work, and with its full recognition will come the day for which we wait—a day whose faint dawn even now flushes the east and gives promise, dim yet sure, of the slowly-nearing light, holding even when most clouded the certainty of
Purer manners, nobler laws.
—HELEN CAMPBELL.
DELECTATIO PISCATORIA.
THE UPPER KENNEBEC.
From the great mere set round with sunbright mountains
Full born the river leaps,
Dashing the crystal of a thousand fountains
Down its romantic steeps.
'Tis now a torrent whose untamed endeavor
Is eager for the sea,
Angry that rock or reef should hinder ever
Its frantic liberty.
Then, for a space, a lake and river blended,
It sleeps with tranquil breast,
As if its haste and rage at last were ended,
And all it sought was rest.