flowers are found under the moss-roofed hut
where the invalid remains; and if a rabbit or
chicken can be obtained in any honest way, they
go as a matter of right to the poor "sick girl's"
room.

It is difficult to ascertain with minute accuracy
statistics of the health of soldiers' wives.
The sanitary condition of the soldiers can be
discovered to a unit, but the condition of the
women can only be approximately compared
with theirs.

The number of married recognised wives in
the Curragh is nearly eight thousand, and the
number of sick cases in each thousand during
the year is four hundred and one. Many of
these cases were trifling, and yielded to medical
care at once, for the death-rate among these
soldiers' wives is but 7.36 per thousand. This
death-rate has not always borne so low a
proportion, for in 1860 it amounted to 9.33 per
thousand, a ratio nearly equal to that which
prevails now among the men. Ventilation, drainage,
good quarters, and other improvements, have
had their usual effect, and two lives have been
saved every year in each thousand by a small
but judicious expenditure on the married men's
quarters. The superior health of the women is
seen at once by comparing it with that of the
men. Soldiers' cases average one hundred and
three per thousand yearly, and the death-rate is
9.99. That sickness and mortality among the
women may be still further reduced is evident
from the fact that scarlet fever, one of those
diseases which may be said to vanish before
sanitary improvements, is set down as the most
prevalent disorder among soldiers' families, and
the most fatal of the eruptive fever class. There
is, too, a striking and suggestive fact connected
with the health of soldiers' wives which ought
to arrest the attention of the military authorities.
Three-fourths of the cases of diathetic diseases
abroad, and double the proportion among men
at home, are due to anæmia, or poverty of blood,
a disorder which is generally the result of
defective nutrition.

So, then, the small black velvet hat or bonnet
with its white feathers so often washed and dried
to curl before the fire, the tiny bright red petticoat,
the dapper little shoes, which make the
soldier's child so trig and neat, are bought by the
mother's blood. The soldier's wife has a hard
task ever before her to make the small amount
of savings meet the cost of, oh! so many things.
Her child must be a credit to her husband and
herself. She must not disgrace the regiment;
she must win a smile of recognition from the
captain's lady; at the infant school she must
rank with the neatest. But how to do it all?
So the mother lives on "next to nothing."
She pinches, pares, and saves, sparing no labour,
and cares not how pale and bloodless are her
cheeks if the face of her child be bright and
ruddy.

Just forty-five years ago there lived at Berlin
one John Gossner. He had been a Roman
Catholic priest in Petersburg, but who became a
Protestant, and was exiled. He went to Berlin,
and was pained at the sufferings endured by
families crowded into a single room when one of
their number was stricken with fever. He had
but little means, yet he hired "a flat" in a house,
and fitted it up as a hospital. Soon the
neighbours objected, and John Gossner took his hat in
his hand and went a-begging. There are kindly
hearts in all the world if we seek for them, and
John Gossner in time brought home enough to
purchase a small house on the outskirts of the
city. Ladies called themselves the Protestant
Deaconesses of Saint Elizabeth, and nursed the
sick. You cannot now see John Gossner's little
hospital, for on its site rises a new and splendid
building, already opened. This building is
capable of holding a hundred and fifty beds.
After the late war, seventy patients were
admitted. The "Sisters," or "Deaconesses," are
chiefly farmers' daughters, or in a similar rank
of life. But high-born ladies do not hesitate to
enter the hospital, and, like our own Florence
Nightingale, lighten the suffering of sick
soldiers or their wives. Is there a John Gossner
near the Curragh to beg and buy some small
house for sick soldiers' wives married without
leave? Or will the time ever come when
marriage shall not be a military crime?

GENII OF THE CAVE

THE cave is a railway-arch, and the genii are
mighty modern magicians who have converted
that arch into a gorgeous temple of luxury.
Further, by a touch of their wand, an arid waste
has become a smiling paradise, misery been
turned into rejoicing, discontent to satisfaction,
famine into plenty, and a social rite, hitherto
repulsive and penal, made a thing of beauty and
a substantial joy. Distress of mind, pain of
body, loss of temper, and intemperance of
language have disappeared under the beneficent
sway of genii who rose from the antipodes to
confer a boon on England, and who have aimed
a severe blow at a tyranny under which the
British railway-traveller has groaned ever since
railways were. It was to the extirpation of
the evils arising from this tyranny that "Mugby
Junction" was especially dedicated; and it
seems appropriate that the readers of this journal
should be introduced to the doughty
champions who have grappled with and conquered
the peculiar abuses we have so long inveighed
against in vain. The pork and veal pies, with
their bumps of delusive promise, and their little
cubes of gristle and bad fat, the scalding
infusion satirically called tea, the stale bad buns,
with their veneering of furniture polish, the
sawdusty sandwiches, so frequently and so
energetically condemned, and, more than all, the icy
stare from the counter, the insolent ignoring of
every customer's existence, which drives the
hungry frantic —all these are doomed. The
genii are rapidly teaching the public that better
things are possible. Hearing to our astonishment
that wholesome food, decently served,
could now be obtained at certain railway stations,