I suppose most people, women included, must have read "Tom Brown's Schooldays." By common consent it remains incontestably the best school story ever written. Now the last link with its author Thomas Hughes is snapped by the death at 81 of his last surviving child, Mary Hughes. There are folk who affect to sneer at the "school of muscular Christianity" represented by Hughes, Arnold and Kingsley. But they did practise what they preached. Many years ago Mary left her charming home in Berkshire to live in a tiny flat in a block of workmen's dwellings in the East End. She took a disused public house, called it the Dewdrop Inn, and converted it into a social home where all visitors were welcome and there was always refreshment for them. She served for many years on the Whitechapel Council but her real work was the Dewdrop Inn, and she remained there even through the air raids. If she had been a Roman Catholic, the Church would probably have canonized her. The Fast End have done that already.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.