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CHAPTER XVII.

CUTTING-OUT EXPEDITION AT THE GROTTO.

"Our most earnest philanthropists and zealous workers in the fields of sin and misery in crowded cities, are coming, more and more every day, to the conviction that an improvement in the physical conditions of life is the first indispensable condition of moral and religious progress."—S. Laing.

The women and girls of Mimosa Vale had assembled at the Grotto for their bi-weekly meeting, over which Maud presided.

"Anything to get away from wholesale factory life," the doctor often remarked when taking counsel as to means for clothing his huge family. Power had been laid on to many of the cottages. Sewing-machine or mangle, spindle or loom, could be attached and worked at a moment's notice.

The good people required, however, direction and assistance. For this purpose "cutting-out" expeditions had been provided at the Grotto. The clothing of one thousand souls—or rather bodies—was no small matter. Two-thirds of their means and energies humble people ordinarily spend in clothing their offspring. Intent, at every turn, upon economizing human labour, and sweetening the conditions of life, the doctor undertook to clothe, as to feed, his protégés with the expendi-