if nature could not forgive crimes of this nature.  She seems to treat them as the unpardonable sin.  If we find cancer appearing in a family at 55 years of age in 3 or 4 successive generations, there is no proof of heredity in that.  Inquire and see if like causes acting on like organisms in 3 or 4 successive generations have not produced the disease each time.  The children are not born cancerous, and our efforts to prevent the disease may succeed.  But children often are born with specific disease, and there is no doubt at all about its being a hereditary disease.  Even now I should not like to sanction marriage in the case of this man who has heroically fasted for 56 days, although he seems for the present to have got rid of his disease.  But the outlook is hopeful, more hopeful than I thought, and in the hope that the suggestion may convey a message of hope to those who are willing to do penance for crimes against the body, I send out these remarks.  The opinion expressed by the patient that he was getting rid of the Salvarsan which had been injected into his blood to cure his disease is, of course, his own only.  I offer no opinion upon it.  But I think the whole case very instructive, and it will be deeply interesting to follow it up with special regard to the inquiry whether the pathological test remains negative.  The reflective reader of these remarks will need no hint from me to suggest how a study of questions of this sort raises in our minds all sorts of other questions, physical, metaphysical, philosophical, social, religious; what are laws of nature, how they come to be what they are, whether they can be disregarded without paying the penalty, and whether we men are bond or free.  Each of us will settle these questions for ourselves, for each of us is responsible for his own conclusion.  But as to the inevitableness with which such questions do rise in our minds, I take it there can be no difference of opinion.

 A. RABAGLIATI.

 HEALTHY HOMEMAKING.

For the benefit of new readers it seems well to explain that this series of articles is not intended for the instruction of experienced housewives.  It was started at the special request of a reader who asked for “a little book on housekeeping, for those of us who know nothing at all about it; and put in all the little details that are presumably regarded as too trivial or too obvious to be mentioned in the ordinary books on domestic economy."

 XXI.  HIRED HELP.

It does not seem proper to conclude the present series of articles without touching upon the “servant problem,” but I do not pretend to be able to solve it.  It is a problem usually very difficult of solution by the homemaker of small means.  If she has but few persons to cater for, and is not the mother of a young family, she is often very much better off without hired help, except for a periodical charwoman.  But it is not always