They sat on the dust-heaps: they found the dust-heaps soft and warm. They sat five abreast on the twentyfour steps of the broad staircase, and screamed with inarticulate joy. Complaints from indignant mothers came thick and fast respecting the after-school condition of Sunday frocks and knickerbockers; but the children never complained. No word of dissatisfaction ever parted their lips. They never lost heart. In spite of exposure and discomfort, with many a severe cold to follow, in spite of begriming dirt and choking dust, that Sunday School of ours throve apace.

Nothing damps the spirits of the East End child; nothing quenches his ardour. Take him on an outing, and while the day is still in its infancy, you will know him through and through. He will arrive too soon; he will arrive in an impossible costume; he will even arrive breathless and hatless. On a very rainy morning, little Sloane appeared at the starting-place for one of our excursions three hours before the advertised time of departure, four hours before the actual time, and in the thinnest imaginable attire. In ten minutes he was wet to the skin, but he would not budge. No tempting offers of hot coffee, no warnings of imminent consumption, could move that boy. He stuck to his post, and he was rewarded by a glorious day. Wet, but glorious! For your true East End child boggles not at trifles. Does the heat scorch him? He holds his face up to the sun "to get brown." Does the cold freeze him? Nothing could be better, because he won't "sweat" when the races come on. Does the rain fall in a deluge? He gleefully catches the drops in his cap. Is there a thunderstorm? He seriously settles down for fifteen seconds to imitate the fizzle and roar of it.

Deeply religious, too, is the East End child. Religion fascinates him. He is not always accurate in his description of what is sometimes sarcastically termed "ecclesiastical millinery"; but when it is remembered that many of his seniors still confound a hood with a stole, his ignorance in that direction is not altogether surprising. Small boy Trubb, after being taken to one of our services, went home with a weird story about myself. "The genkleman," he assured his mother," had a frock and a nightgown on; an' he wore a stockin' round his neck." Little errors of that kind the East End child certainly does make; but his religion is very real to him all the same. Indeed, it is his insatiable curiosity about everything connected with spiritual matters that lands him in such difficulties. When the name of our house was first painted over the door, it excited among our neighbours the usual amount of good-natured chaff. But the children were in dead earnest about it. They could not imagine what it meant. "Cufbert's Lodge, I make it," cried one, after having spelt out the words letter by letter, back and forth, a dozen times or more. "Not it!" retorted his companion. "Cufbert's?"—with exceeding scorn. "It's Cafolic Lodge, that's what it is."

There is your East End child all over. Anything, howsoever remotely associated with religion, interests him, is meat and drink to him; he simply cannot leave it alone. And his simple faith, couched as it invariably is in quaint language, is strangely penetrating and convincing. "Please, dear God, make Dolly alive again," was Ruby Grey's prayer for her dead sister; and St. Paul himself could not have bettered it.

Yet, at the commencement of my work, I found the

children absolutely ignorant of the prayer-book and of the ordinary methods of the simplest Church service. They did not know when to sit, when to stand, when to kneel. Versicles and responses, canticles and hymns, creeds and collects were all so much Greek to them. These things they had to be taught with untiring perseverance. But our labour of love had its reward within a couple of years or so; for by that time the youngest child in our Sunday School knew much of the Morning and Evening Prayer by heart, and many of the elder children could even take an intelligent part in the Holy Communion. Which goes to prove that the East End child is amazingly teachable. You may not be able to make a "lady" or "gentleman" of him, using those terms in the accepted and narrow sense, as the late Sir Walter Besant tried to show; but if you catch him young enough, you may make a God-fearing citizen of him, which is an all-round better thing. In one way, indeed, it is lamentable that religion should be considered merely a matter for the child; but let us be thankful for so much. This tradition, although no more than the remnant of a dead faith, may not impossibly be the means of raising the third and fourth generation of East Enders to a moral and spiritual excellence at present undreamed of.

And, in this connection, we must not forget the influence of the missionary child, a very important factor, as every "worker" will tell you, in the religious life of the East End. Take Nina, for example.

"And who is Nina?" interpolates the interested reader.

Is it possible that I have not yet introduced this diminutive damsel? Then allow me to do so at once.

Nina, then, was one of the keenest of my missionaries. Very small, even for her age, which was seven, dark of eye, tawny of skin, black as to her tangled hair, down as to her stockings, down as to her heels, a veritable gipsy of a child. She never wore a hat; and although her boots were of that particular species known as "laced," they were very far from being so, the laces invariably draggling behind her like comets' tails. Yet was Nina earnest and enthusiastic beyond imagination in one so young. Never shall I forget the shining of her eyes as she met me at the school-door one sad afternoon in mid-November. She held by the hand a lump of goggle-eyed stupidity, and screamed into the semidarkness when I was yet afar off :

"'Ere y' are, Mr. Free! This "--she jerked the little fat mass completely off its feet-"this is the fourth I've brought to Sunday School."

Nor was she less keen in trying to compel her parents into the fold. Numberless were the efforts she made to bring her father to church; and although she failed, she was doggedly determined that he should do something for religion. So her vigorous little mind set to work. Quite accidentally I lighted on the results of her cogitations. "So your father was once a server?" I was saying. "What a pity that he should have broken away so completely from the old life!"

The child's eyes dropped; a faint flush of shame overspread her swart little face. "He don't get boozed as often as he used to," she said in timid excuse.

"But he never comes to church, Nina."

"No, an' he never won't "—with finality; "but-but I've got him-I've got 'im to-" she caught her breath in her eagerness; her face was aglow with excitement.

D

"Well?"

"I've got got 'im to-to gimme a penny for the 'eathen!"

You never find a little East-ender disloyal to father or mother, although he may be instinctively aware that he is espousing an unworthy cause. On the contrary, he will stoutly, even fiercely, defend his parents.

"Muvver 'd come to church, on'y 'er clo'es is all tore," explained a little boy who had done his unsuccessful best to drag his unwilling parent to a Sunday evening service.

"And your father?" I inquired.

"Farver? Well, farver-farver 'e 'ad to go an' buy pidgins las' Sunday."

"My father is a good man, altho' 'e don't go to no church," is a remark which I have heard a hundred times over; and something in my face has occasionally provoked a passionate declaration, such as, "Well, 'e don't get drunk as often as Mister Smiff, anyway."

As for the East End child's affection for the clergy, it is unbounded. Let the man who has no love for children hesitate before going to work in the East End. Otherwise he will have a bad time of it. There the children charge you in the street; and you must be prepared valiantly to receive the shock if you would retain your balance and your dignity. There they will slip their small hands into yours, chat, laugh, dance by your side, then abruptly, with a succession of knowing little nods, scamper off home as fast as their legs can carry them. The shy, sweet glances the timid ones will give you on your return from your yearly holiday, and the ringing cheers the bolder spirits will venture upon on a similar occasion, are more real and more delightful welcome