ginates with youthful mothers bearing children | escapeless misery (without home or friends or for the first time") they themselves may be in- means), seeks her own and her child's death at fluenced for good, and held back from the the same time—for such as these, and we feel sure downward path they have hewn for them- there are many such, who, if in the first comselves, and where their offspring may be trained paratively white hours of their sin and sorrow, as are the children in the (so-called) Foundling when the world's scorn is as nothing to their Hospital, so that of eighty boys and girls sent self-scorn and burning womanly shame, some out as servants and apprentices, in the past year, place of refuge were provided, in which they but two have failed in the satisfactory perform- could find at once relief and counsel, we believe ance of their duties.* that hundreds of miserable women, who now hurry desperately into vicious courses in order to destroy more quickly the memory of past innocence, would fall down and worship the tender hand and pitying heart, that should lift them up out of the soil of self-debasement, and throw the mantle of forgiveness over the fact of their human weakness, and, it may be, loving and uncalculating trust. The cost would be higher than poor-law relief, which at present includes the infant with the mother, and gives her not a crumb of bread more for its sake unless she gives up every effort at self-support, and goes into the house with it. Mr. Vivian suggests that it shall be the duty of relieving officers to assist in obtaining orders of affiliation, and, in all cases of illegitimate birth, to search out the paternity, so as to prevent the burden falling on the union, or exclusively on the mother. Our magistrates know, from painful experience, the difficulty that must beset this proceeding; for their knowledge bears out our own preconception, that it is not the reallyto-be-pitied women-in other words, women who have fallen through seduction-who seek to relieve themselves by affiliating their children, but, as a rule, shameless and hardened ones, whom wretched homes in childhood, without purity or decency of any kind, and the vagrant education of the streets, has left without modesty or reserve, or any other virtuous impediment to be overcome-women in whom the finerinstincts of their sex have gravitated, if they ever existed, in the selfishness of coarse sensualism, and to whom a false oath is a trifle, if it screens the paramour and throws the burden of her child's support on other shoulders. We do not think that such women would be likely to trouble an institution of the kind suggested. But the bona fide victim of seduction, whom shame and despair hurries, in one desperate moment, into the commision of infanticide, who in her ignorance or terror, her agony and bewilderment thrusts the child out of sight; or, from sheer want of knowledge or power to act, neglects it, and it dies; or, in the madness of her hopeless and seemingly * Restricted as is the present system of the Foundling Hospital, by the nature of the cases it relieves (the admissions averaging annually about fortyfour, while the applications average 181), the amount of good done is incalculable. It maintains 500 children, from infancy to fifteen years of age, who are carefully fed, clothed, and instructed, and subsequently apprenticed: the girls to servitude, the boys to trades. The appearance of these children is a suffi We cannot think that such a refuge, which should give no individual shelter twice, and which should exact from all, if possible, some portion of the cost of her child's permanent maintenance and of her own, while in the house, could result in the encouragement of vice! But for those heartless and most unnatural blots on human nature, whose very act libels their humanity, those baby-murderesses, whose ears have heard the cry of their little one, whose eyes have met its helpless, innocent looks, nay, who have laid it to their cruel bosoms and suckled it, and yet with unrelenting brutality, because it is in their way, seek out in ventions in murder to get rid of it unsuspected, or, at any rate, destroy it, feeling certain to escape the only punishment they fear to suffer- we have no sympathy. What sig nifies to such women the few weeks' or months' imprisonment on a false issue, with which the morbid sympathy of jurors enable them to get off? forgetful that they themselves, by permitting this failure of justice, are helping to spread the virus of the most barbarous crime that can degrade a nation. It would be against the nature of all successful criminal acts, to suppose that such women do not, upon occasion, resort to its repetition. The first deliberate crime of this sort must sear all true maternal feeling out of them, and this hardness reacts by hardening others. These are the initiators of younger women in their own bad secrets, or their bolder sin; and so infanticide flourishes, and grows daily more and more a common occur rence. small a murder to be visited with capital punishSurely, if violently taking a baby's life is too ment, some secondary penalty short of death, yet sharp enough to act as a deterrent, should be enacted, and uncompromisingly executed. Until this is done, and until also a place of cient guarantee for the paternal government of their HOME, and the benevolent spirit in which the guar- become mothers for the first time, there will be refuge is established for young women about to dians and officers in connection with the charity carry to be feared, but little diminution of child out their duties. But, besides the good effected in nurturing and educating a large number of innocent and otherwise unprovided for children, it is the happy means of saving their mothers also, and restoring them to their place in the community from which, but for its timely mercy, they must for ever have fallen. murder. The objections taken to "Foundling Hospitals," in the broad sense of such charities, are numerous and valid. The abuses to which they are at present subjected in continental countries, and the base purposes to which the hospital in Lamb's Conduit Fields was converted during the period of its governmental patronage, have sufficiently proved this. At that period London tradespeople were brutal enough to lay their sick and dying children in the cradle at the Foundling-gate, to avoid the cost of burying them. Others, with larger families than were convenient, took advantage of its existence, and left their children to be brought up at the public expense, and in ignorance of their parentage. It was the means of introducing a new species of local traffic, and carriers traded to town from distant counties with pack-horses, loaded with panniers of babies, for the Foundling, who, for want of proper attendance and nourishment, died wholesale on the road, or survived only to perish when received into the hospital. It was these, and similar flagrant acts, that occasioned an entire revolution of the original design of the founder, and resulted in the present modified and limited charity. Some of these eighteenth century abuses it would now be impossible to impose; but there is still the cry of the political economist, and of many others, that the existence of such institutions encourage vice by the ease with which the consequence of it may be disposed of. Even this assertion is capable of argument, since in all probability the full complement of such immorality is perpetrated irrespective of any ulterior calculations whatever. At any rate there can be no question as to the relative criminality of child-murder and the sin, the commission of which it is intended to hide. If the bones of Captain Coram, like those in the open valley which Ezekiel saw, could stir, and have sinews laid on them, and flesh, he would be somewhat surprised to find that the work which occupied him for so many years of his life had all to be done over again, and that England, his England-the England that sends philanthropically black silk stockings to African negroes, and patent refrigerators to the Esquimaux, had, more than a century later in its civilization, become a byword to nations (who probably sow their charities less broadcast than ourselves) for the flagrancy of the crime which he laboured to correct-a crime by no means common amongst simply savage people, though familiar to certain semi-barbarous ones. Surely the parable of the "beam and moat' "needs home application in plain, strong Saxon words! and the cry, "Physician, heal thyself," with all its sarcasm and its censure, to be reiterated at the market cross, rather than to be softly spoken out of velvet cushions, HAND-ORGAN S. "Donald Caird's come again! Just as the harvest sun of July was streaming down with the accumulated energy of midafternoon, and the sweaty reapers were bending over the heaviest of my wheat-a patch so heavy it would have done good to the eyes of a connoisseurin crops-my terriers raised a flurried bark, and then suddenly were still again; while from the umbrageous region of the spring came the nasal melody of a wheezy hand-organ, straining piteously at the overture to "Semiramide." Presto! what a change! The scythes dashed into the brittle straw with renewed vigour; the rakers handled their implements, and the binders twisted the bands and tossed aside the sheaves as if they were performing parts in a cotillon, and, before the white-toothed Lucchese had gotten from "" Semiramide" through "Hear me, Norma," and opened with "Jeannette and Jeannot," the "through" was cut, scythes and rakes thrown down by the fence, and my whole force, both home and foreign, had adjourned to the spring, to take a drink and hear "the music." "The music!"-that brown-cheeked Italian boy, dirty, begrimed with sweat, and his smiles overcome with heat and weary walking-that battered organ, flutonicon hight, with its forlorn, ricketty puppet-show, its polished crank, its dusty green baize, and its crazy, wretched, tuneless condition; the total want of expression with which it volubleized in jerky gasps the tunes I have named, followed by a chorus from "Sicilian Vespers" (procul este profani !) “God save the Prince of Wales," "Marseilles," and "Yankee Doodle "-this was "the musi c' Yet it was music. All listened, charmed. Lucchese-poor velveteen-clad wanderer "con la commedia”-reaped a rich harvest of copper fully and economically managed, and is always | last year; but of this £200 was appropriated open to the inspection of visitors. The annual towards expenses for the enlargement of the subscriptions have been augmented from hospital. Her gracious Majesty, as in previous £1,937 in 1864 to £2,302 in 1865. The years, kindly sent the poor children a present expenditure has risen from £4,281 to £4,610 of toys, which was greatly appreciated. LEAVES FOR THE LITTLE ONE S. BY M. C. Papa (said Albert), I heard you say something the other day about a water-clock. How could a clock be made of water? PAPA. It was the first machine, my boy, that was used for measuring time, of which we know anything. it? ALBERT. But how could you tell the time by PAPA. It was not so much to know the hour as to prevent orators from making long speeches. When you are a little older you will meet with an expression of Cicero's-"latrare ad clepsydram," which means throwing cold water upon the speaker. The machine itself was called a clepsydra. ALBERT. What was it like, Papa? PAPA. It was a vessel in the form of a cylinder, filled with water, which gradually disappeared through a hole in the bottom; a floating index, or hand, pointed to the successive hours (marked on one side), as the water went down. PAPA. Let us ask Tiny what she is looking so wise about: she looks as if she couldn't quite understand what we have been saying. Come here, little woman. Her Papa then took Emma on his knee, when she said: Papa, my history tells stories, because it told me that King Alfred shewed us how to count the hours by having six candles all made of the same length, and with twelve lines marked upon them. PAPA. Is that all? EMMA. I can't remember the rest. ALBERT. That's just like a girl. I wouldn't begin what I couldn't finish. PAPA. You finish it for her. But my dear, what your book says is quite right, King Alfred's way was to show the true hour of the day, which the machine did not. Now, Albert, let us hear what more you have to say about the candles. ALBERT. Why that the six lasted twenty-four hours. EMMA. But the wind might have blown them out. ALBERT. And so it would fast enough if he had not had a lantern, made of horn, to put them in. Papa, what do you think Em wanted to know to-day-if Blue Beard was a real man. PAPA. And what did you tell her? EMMA. He laughed, Papa, and called me a little stupid. PAPA. Perhaps he will not think himself so wise when he hears that Blue Beard was a very famous person mentioned in history. He lived in the reigns of Charles VI and VII. ALBERT. Was Charles VI the silly king who. had cards invented, to amuse him, when he had one of his silly fits? PAPA. Yes, the same; but I was telling you about the man who was so notorious for his wickedness. His real name was Gilles, Marquis de Savals. As Marshal of France he rendered good service to his country, when the English invaded France. EMMA. But was that wicked, Papa? PAPA. Wait, my dear: In that he was quite right, and his bravery would have made him to be looked upon with pride and pleasure by his countrymen, if one did not remember at the same time that he committed all sorts of crimes for his own wicked purposes. He destroyed men, took God's name in vain, and was everywhere feared and detested. ALBERT. Was he well off, Papa ? and didn't he get punished? PAPA. He had immense riches, which he lavished on himself, his own pleasures, and people. He always took about with him a band of musicians, fifty or sixty dogs, three hundred saddle-horses, and a great many naughty people called sorcerers. You know God says the wicked shall not always go unpunished, and at last his sin found him out. He had done some very dreadful deeds against the Duke of Brittany, for which he was sentenced to be burnt alive, at Nantes in 1440. ALBERT. But what had that to do with his name, and putting him into children's books? PAPA. Although of noble birth he was a very ugly man, with a long beard; so people have made him look as hideous as they can in the prints, which nurses very often show to children to frighten them. Wherever he went he was called by the nickname of Blue Beard, and glad enough the people were to keep out of his way. GEOGRAPHY ON HORSEBACK. BY L. A. B. Little Jack Joy came crying home from school one day, flung his books into the farthest corner of the kitchen, threw himself on the floor, and cried aloud. The teacher had punished him again, for imperfect lessons. No wonder. He was enough to ruin the dispositions of a regiment of school-teachers; for he would not study, and he would play all the time, until about ten minutes before recitation, and then of course he had very imperfect lessons. His mother had gone to see a sick neighbour, and his sister Lettie had gone to stay an hour with Bell Gray, so he had the kitchen all to himself. He would scarcely have thrown his books on the floor if his mother had been at home. There was a mouse-hole behind the closet door, and presently a mouse peeped out to see what was the matter. Jack still lay sobbing on the floor. 66 "Books are not very good to eat, I dare say," thought the mouse, or Jack would not throw them away." He nibbled a little at the corner. "This is remarkably nice for a nest," he said to himself: "I wonder Jack does not make a nest of it. I think I will take some home to my wife." Mice never seem to set a high value upon books. I presume they are not at all competent to judge of their merits; so he was not so much to blame for trying his sharp little teeth upon the leaves. I have often seen boys do the same. He was wondering how much of the nibblings he could carry away at a time, when he was greatly startled by the sound of a horse's hoofs just over his head. It was the little Highlanders pony upon the cover of the Geography, impatiently pawing the ground. His ears were laid back, as though he was very much disturbed at the mouse's operations. The mouse retreated a few steps, and paused, and the little rider said politely: "I presume you are not aware, Mr. Mouse, that these are my premises. There is a piece of paper you can make your nest of." The mouse was so overwhelmed with surprise and dismay, that he could only stammer out some sort of apology, which sounded like a discomfited squeak, and slunk away to his hole, in great confusion. Then the Highlander started off at a canter up and down the room, his plaid tartan floating behind like a banner. Presently he paused directly in front of the troubled schoolboy, raising his cap, and looking as if he wanted to speak with him. Then Jack thought it was all a dream; but often one can scarcely tell whether he is awake or dreaming. Jack rubbed his eyes, but still the small horseman sat there, gravely holding his cap in his hand. "Well, I declare, you are a comical little fellow," said the boy in great wonder. Did you come all the way from Lilliput to see me?" The strange visitor shook his head. "I am not from Lilliput at all-don't you know me?" By King Harry! I believe I've seen you before. Aren't you the picture on the cover of my Geography?" "To be sure; but who's King Harry? I've seen all the kings on the earth, but" 'Oh, never mind; that was some of my nonsense. Can I do anything for you?" "I wanted to tell you that you should be a little more careful; you hurt my head pretty badly against the door." Jack got up on his elbow. "Let me get you the camphor." "Oh, no. I only want to know why you dislike me so much." "Dislike you? I don't. I think you are the nicest little fellow I have seen this long time. But you don't know how I hate geography. If you'll believe it, this is the fifth day I've had that same lesson about mountains, lakes, and rivers, and haven't got it yet." "I know it. And haven't I been sitting here, day after day, waiting to help you get it." "Well, this is a joke, now. I thought you were printed on the book-cover, just to make the book look pretty, and to make us boys think geography was something fine." "No, Indeed. I sit there to help boys get their lessons." "Then for pity's sake why didn't you help me get mine?" "Oh, I can only assist scholars who have a desire to learn; and you" "Yes yes, I know all about it. I don't suppose I cared much whether I got my lesson or not." "No; when a boy is shelling chesnuts, or reading Gulliver's Travels under the desk, with his book open, to make the teacher think he is studying, I take it for granted he don't care much about his lessons." "But I do care now; and if you will only help me about mountains, lakes, and rivers, I will do better." "Will you really try?" "Yes, I will." "That's enough; boys can do almost anything they try to do; so jump up here behind me.' "Get on your horse? You might as well tell me to jump on the back of a butterfly." "Oh, I forgot-you must have the pills first." "Pills? I don't want any of your pills." from his bosom something that resembled a The little horseman made no reply, but took heart; but upon touching a secret spring, it opened like a box, and he took out three small pills, and gave them to Jack. "Are they bitter?" asked Jack. "You may find them a little disagreeable, though some think them quite pleasant. They are Resolution, Patience, and Perseverance. You cannot get along at all without them." when you are at study, inhale its fragrance now and then, and your mind will become fixed upon learning." Jack swallowed them with a wry face, for he was not much used to such prescriptions. He❝ How delicious! You must know a great was immediately seized with a great desire to deal about the world, travelling about in this learn everything about geography, and at the way." same time he became as small as the little Highlander himself. So he quickly mounted behind him, crying out: "Hurrah for mountains, lakes, and rivers!" Away they went, like the wind, like the hurricane, the lightning. It quite took Jack's breath away, but his companion chatted on very comfortably. He was used to it. At length they stopped upon a high eminence up among the clouds. "Look around," said his guide, "and tell me where you are." Well," he said, catching his breath, and breathing very fast, "I should think we were on the top of a mountain; I can see cities and rivers, and the ocean and forests down below." "What is a mountain, then?" "A mountain-why 'a mountain is a high elevation of land,'" Jack shouted, in great glee. "That's question number one; but what is that smoke coming out of the top of that mountain, about five thousand miles off, there? Is that a volcano ?" "Of course it is. What is a volcano ?" "A volcano is a burning mountain.' That's question number two. I believe I rather like geography; but what's the name of this mountain ?" "This is Ben Lomond." "Is it? Then we must be in Scotland, right where Fitz James and Rhoderick Dhu had their famous sword fight. And that big blue pond down there among the trees is Loch Lomond, I suppose? Loch means lake, doesn't it?" "You are right. What is a lake ?" "I think you've caught me now. No, I have it. A lake is a body of water surrounded by land.' And that zig-zag stream, that looks like a great blue serpent, is a river, isn't it?" "What is a river?" "A large stream of water flowing over the land.' It seems now as though I always knew that lessson." "You never took the trouble to think about it before, perhaps." “Well, I don't think there is any need of my getting so many floggings for such an easy and beautiful lesson as that. I'm really very much obliged to you. You wouldn't give me that feather in your cap, to remember you by, I suppose?" No, not that; it is a feather from the right wing of the Phoenix, and is a sort of charm or talisman, which enables me to go from place to place with such rapidity. But here is a leaf from the Tree of Knowledge, which would do you far more good. Carry it with you, and "Yes; but nothing more than you can learn from your books, with far less trouble." "What's that?" cried Jack, in alarm, as a huge, fierce-looking monster came flying towards them. "Why, it's my friend Arithmetic," answered the Highlander; "but he seems in a savage mood to-day." Jack thought of all the stories he had read of dragons, and other flying monsters, and his flesh began to creep with fear. The wings of the monster were made of curiously-woven examples in addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division, and on his breast were the nine digits, in gorgeous colours. His scarf formed a banner, on which was displayed the motto"Arithmetic is the science of numbers." He wore a most ferocious aspect, and carried a war club, upon which was painted, in flaming red, "Knowledge is power." As soon as he came within speaking distance, he cried out "I'll teach you to throw me about in that way again, Master Jack Joy! I've been on your track ever since I came to my senses. Take that!" hitting him violently on the head with his club, upon which Jack seemed to fall from the top of Ben Lomond, down through interminable space quite through the earth's centre, till he found himself lying upon the floor of his mother's kitchen, and his sister Lettie holding a geranium leaf to his nose, which very much resembled in odour the leaf of the Tree of Knowledge his new friend had given him. "How that fellow hurt me !" he said rubbing his head. mean to. But just see my new little kitten that "I'm so sorry!" said his sister-"I didn't Bell's mother gave me! I was running to catch her, and hit my shoe right against your head; and only look how the mice have nibbled your nice new Geography; they won't do it anymore, will they, kitty." THE SECRET OF SUCCESS.-Our success in life generally bears a direct proportion to the exertions we make; and if we aim at nothing we shall certainly achieve nothing. By the remission of labour and energy, it often happens that poverty and contempt, disaster and defeat steal a march upon prosperity and honour, and overwhelm us with reverses and shame. |