SLEEPING OUT OF DOORS.

White Ribbon, Volume 13, Issue 155, 16 April 1908, Page 21

SLEEPING OUT OF DOORS.

Mrs Mary Kenney O’Sullivan, the well-known organiser of women’s trade unions, sleeps in the open air, on the roof of a tall tenement house in Boston- She has done so all the winter, even when the thermometer was 14 below zero, and she is a picture of rosy health. She says : ‘ I don’t do this because I am ill. I do it because I intend not to be ill. Three years ago I broke down and went to a sanitarium, where I learned to sleep out of doors. Ever since I have been looking for a way to get back to it, but only this winter have 1 found one. I have slept on the roof here, generally, four nights a week all winter, and have spent the other nights with my children, who live in a house out in Roxbury. You can’t fancy how I miss the open air those nights. It often seems as though I should smother, even with all the windows open.” Mrs O’Sullivan says that the secret of sleeping comfortably out of

doors is to have a warm bed underneath. Hers was a hair mattress covered with a heavy pad. In the coldest weather she tied herself up in a bag of sheepskins, presented to her by the Sheepskin-Workers’ Union. She added a hot-water bottle, and wore a knitted cap. “It’s the only way to sleep,” she says, with enthusiasm. Mrs O’Sullivan is agent foi the big tenement building on the roof of which she has her airy chamber. It is by managing estates and by occasional writing that she supports herself and her children, not by her trade-union work, which is done wholly for love. A picture taken of her the other day in New York, where she had gone to attend the peace meeting, shows her with Miss Mary MacDowell, of Chicago, “ the angel of the stockyards. ’’ and on it a humorous friend of both women has written, “ the fighting Marys, who stand for universal peace!” -Boston “Women’s Journal.”