Another case Mr.Holmes visited was that of a young girl, twelve years of age, charged in the police court with stealing food.He found her the deputy mother of a boy of nine, a crippled boy of seven, and a younger child.Her mother was a widow and a blouse-maker.She paid $1.25 a week rent.Here are the last items in her housekeeping account: Tea, 1 cent; sugar, 1 cent; bread, 1/2 cent; margarine, 2cents; oil, 3 cents; and firewood, 1 cent.Good housewives of the soft and tender folk, imagine yourselves marketing and keeping house on such a scale, setting a table for five, and keeping an eye on your deputy mother of twelve to see that she did not steal food for her little brothers and sisters, the while you stitched, stitched, stitched at a nightmare line of blouses, which stretched away into the gloom and down to the pauper's coffin a-yawn for you.
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