But we are due at that Lilliput village on the brow of Hornsey Rise—that series of cottage homes, where, on each lower and upper storey, with their exquisitely clean nursery cots and cradles, and their tiny furniture, a neat nurse is to be seen like a fairy godmother, with a family of chubby babies, or a more advanced charge of infants able to run like squirrels round the covered playground or to spend the regulation hours in that great glorious school-room, where learning is turned into recreation, and lessons are made vocal, gymnastic, zoological, picturesque, or even fictional, as the times and circumstances may dictate. "The Alexandra Orphanage for Infants" has become so well-known amidst the numerous institutions {156} which have been established for the care of the orphans and the fatherless, that one might think it would be full of eager admirers who on visiting days go to see the two or three hundred. Why are not all the cottages full, and each little toy bedstead complete with its rosy, tiny sleeper, who, from earliest infancy to the maturer age of eight years form the assembly for which Mr. Soul set himself to provide by public appeal? These, then, are the two institutions to which that modest little convalescent home in Harold Street, Margate, is a worthy appanage, and they may well find support among those whose maxim it is to do with all their might what their hands find wants doing. {157} WITH THEM THAT FAINT BY THE WAY. There are perhaps few conditions demanding greater sympathy and more ready aid than that of poor women who, from temporary sickness or the weariness that comes of hope deferred, are unable to follow the employments, often precarious and yielding a bare subsistence, by which they strive to be independent of charitable aid. It is only those who know to what extremities of need they will submit for shame of making their poverty known, and what mental suffering they will endure as they find their scanty savings dwindling day by day, and their few household goods, or even their clothing, and the little family mementoes, which they can only part with as a last resource, going piece by piece, who can fully realise all that is meant by the genteel phrase, "very reduced circumstances," as applied to women of refined feelings, and frequently of gentle nurture, who find themselves without the means of obtaining necessary food and medical care when health and strength give way, and they can no longer work at those few callings by which they can earn enough to enable them to avoid a dreaded "application to friends."