institution, while sewing and other familiar household branches were ignored, she exerted herself to the utmost to reverse this arrangement, and, in the end, after much delay and difficulty, with success. Then in order that remote rural schools and those of neglected city suburbs might be enabled to undergo the government inspection necessary before receiving their share of the public money granted for educational purposes, she worked out a plan for having them visited by regularly appointed traveling school-masters. This scheme was submitted to the Privy Council and adopted.
But it is perhaps within the area of the city of London that Miss Coutts' good works have been most successful, or, at least, that their results are most apparent. She founded there a shelter and reformatory for young women who had gone astray. Of those who received its benefits during a period of seven years, half were known to have begun new lives, to have remained virtuous and become fairly prosperous, in the colonies. In Spitalfields, when that region of London had become a haunt of misery and destitution, she established a sewing school for grown women, where they were not only taught, but provided with food and work—government contracts being undertaken for them and executed by their labor. From this institution nurses are sent out among the sick of the neighborhood, who are supplied with wine and proper nourishment. Thence, too, outfits are provided for poor servants, and winter clothes distributed among needy women.
In the same squalid region was a place, a plague-spot upon the city for years, known and dreaded by the police under the title of Nova Scotia Gardens. This place Miss Coutts purchased, and, clearing the ground of all the refuse, filth, and squalor that had so long polluted it, she erected thereon the block of model dwellings, now called Columbia Square. This block consists of separate tene-
