to a Great Adventure. He enlisted. Well, the first winter had not passed before it was demonstrated that Mrs. Black and the children—there were five of them—were not going to experience any new hardship because of the absence of the head of the family in Flanders. By January she was saying hopefully one morning across the fence to her neighbour in the next little smoke-coloured brick house in the long dingy row: "If them that's makin' this war'll only keep it up long enough, I'll be on my feet again."
To-day you may say that Mrs. Black is "on her feet." There are Nottingham lace curtains at her front windows as good as any in the whole row of Lamson's Walk. The new chest of drawers she's needed ever since she was married is a place to put the children's clothes. And it's such a help to keeping the three rooms tidy. Santa Claus came at Christmas with a graphophone. And you ought to see Mrs. Black's fur coat! Three other women who haven't got theirs yet were in the night she wore it home "just to feel the softness of it." Their hands, do you know, hands that are hard and grimy with England's black town soot, had never so much as touched fur before! And they're going to wear it soon, if this war keeps up. For they're all of them these new women in industry, like Mrs. Black.
Mrs. Black, to begin with, has her "separation allowance" because her husband's at the front. That's 12 shillings and sixpence per week for herself, 5 shillings for the first child, three shillings six-
