small table on and under which are heaped a mass of things without order or arrangement. In a corner are piled the wretched bedding and a few threadbare clothes.

We found J.'s wife in the room with her little boy on her arms, her gaze distracted, her features miserable. The moment we entered the room, the terrified little girls took fright and clung to the hem of their mother's dress. The children are five: the eldest no more than seven years old, paralyzed in his left hand; the youngest not past his first month, born after his father entered the hospital. The fourth child suffers the pains of a racking illness; he weeps and twitches continually; and another has been crying and troubling his mother for an hour, because he is hungry.

The wretched woman spoke to us with warmth of her misery and her suffering. When my husband was in the prime of his youth, strong and brimming with vitality, he squandered the greater part of his earnings on gambling. They were quickly blessed with this large number of children... and they were forever in need of the necessary daily bread. She added: my family

could have helped us, but they are poor like us.

This family of J.'s lives on the charity of the neighbors: one sends them a little flour, another a little rice and sugar, a third some chickpeas and beans... And very often the mother finds nothing to give her little ones.

Her husband has left her, and she has no source of livelihood. He is now dying in a sanatorium. Perhaps her only hope is that we shelter one of her children in an orphanage when the father dies.

Here is a second, similar case: the family of A. S. This man is thirty-three years old — strong, extremely vigorous, energetic, skilled in his trade as a builder; the employers who pay a daily wage of six to seven Lebanese liras are always asking for him. He lived in comfort and ease with his family, made up of his

wife and three small children of seven, five, and two. Thanks to his prudence and thrift he saved some money.

Then suddenly illness struck him, and he was treated at home for four months. The savings ran out... He sold a piece of land he owned in the mountains at a trifling price, and this money too was quickly gone. What was he to do?

A. was moved to the Quarantina, where his treatment began free of charge. But how is his family to live, what is to be done, and what source of livelihood remains to him?

Here the crisis was met: A.'s cousins did everything in their power for their sister and her three children. The eldest brother, thirty years old, per-formed a heroic act: he broke off his engagement to a girl he had

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