Page:The poor sisters of Nazareth, Meynell, 1889.djvu/48

42 additional space needed for the children only. The old men and women overflowed the rooms in which they were first gathered. Old people live so long under tender care that those who come knocking at the door for admittance are more numerous than those who pass away to the only refuge which is still quieter. At Nazareth House there is none of the voluntary or the involuntary unkindness; there is none of the inevitable impatience that in the homes of misery outside shortens disease, and hurries old age, and "speeds the parting guest;" here the dying are in no haste to die.

In addition to the internal work of the house, the Sisters have undertaken during the last few winters a soup-kitchen, which has brought several hundred starving people from all parts of London daily to their gates. The Sisters have risen to set on their cauldrons at half-past four on the winter mornings. And it has been hard to find the wherewithal. Sometimes the inmates have voluntarily given up their share, the food which is inevitably an important incident of their days, to the outsiders—men cowering in the hard frost, and in some cases literally fainting from famine. One thousand nine hundred persons, all told, have eaten their bread in one day in Nazareth House, until the last of all the fragments has been consumed. The soup-kitchen is absolutely free. The Sisters found that in the conditions of the unemployed it was best to put no obstacle, not even that of a ticket, in the way of approach to this daily food.