then again, about your poor back, what a pity to make it bad with sewing. Take care of yourself; take and practise the advice you give me. Get ready for work. Let us try again for the glory of God. The Lord is using me here and bringing up the Church. I have been at them all the week, and the result is a great spirit of enquiry and reconsecration. Many of the people have, I believe, really and truly consecrated, and with many more there is a healthful enquiry after more of God.

In one of the letters addressed to Mrs. Booth in London occurs this interesting passage:

Mr. Shadford spoke very kindly to me after you left. They both sympathized with us very much, I believe. He reminded me all the way through of the old gentleman who met and talked to George at the Hotel there when he was running away in Uncle Tom. As we went down to the station I said, “I forgot to pay for the things I had out of the shop, but I will give it you at the station.' "Why," he said, "as far as that I have a £5 note in my pocket to give you at the station, and that is about how matters stand between us just now." With a gentle exhortation to all reasonable economy, and a request twice urged that if at any time we were in any difficulty I was to write him and he would help us, he passed the bit of dirty paper to me which I received gratefully and with a proper measure of thanksgiving. . . . I shall send him a line from here and you must just write him a page. You heard how they pitched into my writing and praised yours. There, as elsewhere, I must decrease and you increase! I enclose you two halves, and send the other two to father. Put them together and let father deposit them with the cheque at the Alliance Bank.

When you told me that you had nothing left, I forgot the Post Office Order. You surely did not spend that £6 as well as all the cash I left behind. Well, I am determined to economise, and I shall write Mary to put the screw on, and I am putting it on here myself. I will either stop this living at the rate of £6 a week or I will know the reason.1 It mortifies me beyond measure. I won't blame you. I have very possibly spent much lately. Those forks, etc., we could have done without. If mother proposes to pay for the spoons, let her; and she shall have that teapot. If I got her initials on it, it would look something, and please her. You might bring it about, some way or other. It won't become our table exactly for the present.

1 £6 a week, for a family where the father and mother are constantly away living in lodgings, does not seem a very extravagant allowance.

We find him confessing to extravagance in the next let

ter:

I paid Miller £3: 8:0 yesterday. I bought two books from him for 2/6. One by Calvin Cotton on Revivals, and a good School History of Greece for Willie and the children in turns. He has 2 vols. of Macaulay's History of England, the 3rd and 4th. He offers them for 5/. Should I have them? I suppose not. They are good reading for a leisure hour.

Later on in the same letter we read:

I have been very poorly ever since I came home. I have had to shut out the children since breakfast. My head has been so bad; it is a little better. I went supperless to bed at 10 o'clock, in the hope of getting a refreshing night's sleep, but was disappointed. I was awake very early, feeling dreadfully.

Then he refers to her meetings in London:

I am glad you had so good a meeting. I have no doubt about your adaptation for that sphere, or for almost any sphere, and I could never stand in your way or prohibit your labouring when . . . you could do so much good. This I settled years ago. All your talk about my adaptation. shows how ignorant you are of the kind of men who are now at work, specially in London, and also of my "superficiality "; but it is of no use talking on this theme! I will come to London, and once more. . .

...

Here, unfortunately, the sheet ends, and the rest of the letter is not to be found. The Booths moved to London in this year, and set up house in Hammersmith.

Besides the money paid to them out of the collections taken at their meetings, they were able to secure a small additional income by the sale of their pamphlets and books. William Booth managed his wife's pamphlets as well as his own Song Book, and in one of his letters he says of a sum of money, which is either £5 or £10, that "it is not more, nor as much by pounds, as I have received for books. the last month." It would seem that by their missions, their sale of books, and with the help of one or two welloff sympathizers, they were now earning some three or four hundred pounds a year, but precariously. They lived with extreme simplicity. The children were dressed without any

display. Mrs. Booth was one of those very capable women who can find time for household work side by side with great public activity. She was often in the kitchen, when William Booth would come to consult her, he sitting on the edge of the table, while she, with her hands covered in dough, went on with her cake making. In more than one of her letters to her mother she begs Mrs. Mumford, who was an industrious needlewoman, not to send fine clothes for the children. For example:

Accept my warmest thanks for the little frock you sent. We like it very much. There is only one difficulty, namely, it is too smart! I shall have to give you full and explicit directions in future as to the style, trimming, etc., for we really must set an example in this respect worthy of imitation. I feel no temptation now to decorate myself. But I cannot say the same about my children. And yet, oh, I see I must be decided, and come out from among the fashion-worshipping, worldly professors around me. Lord, help me!

Not only did Mrs. Booth manage her house with great thoroughness, but, in order to meet their heavier expenses in London, she took in first one lodger, and afterwards, in moving into a larger and more convenient house, two. It is almost incredible that a woman so weak and delicate, so often exposed to serious physical collapse, and so frequently engaged in a most exhausting form of public work, should have found time to superintend the education of her children, to practise a careful domestic economy, and to look after the needs of a large household including a couple of lodgers. But Mr. Bramwell Booth, who perfectly remembers this time, assures me that his mother did all these things, and did them well.

CHAPTER XXI

A LADY LODGER'S ACCOUNT OF THE BOOTHS' HOME life

1865-1867

It is not until the Booths take up their residence in Hackney - where their daughter Eva was born that we are able to see them with any degree of clearness in the intimacy of domestic life.

One of the ladies who went to lodge with them in 1867 was Miss Jane Short, whose age sits lightly upon her, whose memory is as perfect as the most exacting biographer could wish, and who is happily of a humorous disposition, with no desire in the world to exaggerate the remarkable qualities of her dead friends. Very often as she speaks of the Booth household she breaks into cheerful laughter, recognising as shrewdly as any practical and unimaginative person the eccentricity of that family life. At the same time, her testimony is emphatic to the nobility of the Booths, and to the reality of their passionate religious zeal.

"To tell you the truth," she informed me at our first meeting, "I was terribly afraid of going to live with these dear folk, because I had been so often disappointed, grievously disappointed, in religious people. It seemed to me that the Booths could not possibly be in their home life what they were in their preaching. I thought I should see things and hear things which would distress me; I could not imagine that it was possible for them to live their ideals. You see, I loved them so well that I quite shrank from finding my hero-worship an illusion."

She had first encountered Mrs. Booth at Margate, where the latter was conducting a Mission, and afterwards had attended some of the preachings in the East End of London. Admiration of Mrs. Booth had quickly ripened into friendship, and William Booth had won her liveliest sympathy and her utmost enthusiasm at their first encounter.

"People who say that Mrs. Booth was the greater of

the two," declares Miss Short, " do not know what they are talking about. Mrs. Booth was a very able woman, a very persuasive speaker, and a wonderful manager; but the General was a force - he dominated everything. I've never met any one who could compare with him for strength of character. You knew the difference in the house directly he opened the door. You felt his presence in every department of the home life. He was a real master. "You could never say No to the General!" she laughs. "It was he who decided, not I, that I was to live with them. When he said a thing had to be done, it was done, and quickly, too. We used to call him 'The General' long before there was any Salvation Army. He couldn't bear beating about the bush. Prevarication, like stupidity, exasperated him. Everything had to go like clockwork, but very much faster than time. I always say that he got forty-eight hours' work out of the twenty-four."

And then, laughing quietly to herself, she says, “Of course he was queer. He often used to say to me, 'Sister Jane, the Booths are a queer lot,' and laugh mischievously, for he was often laughing. I've known him suddenly kneel down in the middle of breakfast and give thanks to God because a letter he had opened contained money for the Mission. He'd be tremendously in earnest at one moment, and the next he'd be laughing at himself, saying that he was a queer fellow. He'd change, too, in a twinkling of an eye from gloom and dejection to a contagious hilarity that carried everything before it. He suffered in those days — neuralgia and indigestion; it was often dreadful to see how the poor man suffered; but he would fling it all off directly there was work to do, or if he had to comfort anybody else, particularly Mrs. Booth. His love for his wife was the most beautiful thing I have ever known. It really was an exquisite thing. You know, perhaps, that Mrs. Booth was a great invalid. Her sufferings, at times, made her irritable and exacting. The least noise on some occasions would almost distract her. Well, it was at such times as these that the love of the General shone out most beautifully. Never once did he say a harsh word, never once did he try rallying her with rough encouragement; no,