"About My Father's Business": Work Amidst the Sick, the Sad, and the SorrowingArcher, Thomas
Religion
"About My Father's Business": Work Amidst the Sick, the Sad, and the Sorrowing
Archer, Thomas
Pastoral theology
together, the nurse with lateral curvature of the spine and
the baby with vertical curvature or with deformities of
the feet or legs. One thinks, in short, of the many perils
to healthy life and well-formed limb that beset the children
of the poor, and then coming back to the figures of
this National Home, which yet, with careful management
and due economy, can only receive forty or fifty
crippled boys—wonders how long it is to be before the
ruddy old house in Wright's Lane will expand its broad
bosom and stretch out long arms on either side to embrace
three-score more lads, taken from present neglect and
want and probable ill-usage, to be fed and taught and nurtured
for three years, during which the whole future will be
changed for them, and their lives redeemed from the degradation
that had threatened them just as their bodies
expand with renewed health and strange developments of
unsuspected strength, and their souls are lighted with hope
and the sympathy of loving words and hearty manly encouragement.
A beginning has been made already; for that munificent
anonymous benefactor, whose thousand-pound cheques
have helped so many of our deserving charities, showed
his usual nice discrimination by taking a walk in the direction
of Wright's Lane. The result of this has been
the erection of those long workshops which extend across
one side of the wide green area, with its ornamental
{185}
trees, at the back of the building—an area which is
a good part of the acre on which the property stands,
and forms a capital recreation-ground, without quite
leaving out of sight the pleasant kitchen-garden beyond,
or the little building in the further corner, which
is intended as a cottage infirmary in cases of sickness.
There are the workshops, quite ready for another contingent
of lads, such as are now busily at work in the
tailoring department, where they are sitting on the board
in the proper tailor-fashion, sewing away at one or other
of the many private orders for gentlemen's clothes, or
"juvenile suits," which are the better appreciated because
they are hand-sewn, instead of being made with that
machine, at the end of the room, to learn the working of
which is, however, a necessary part of the modern tailor's
trade. Quite ready, also, for our friends the relief-stampers,
and for an additional crew of young carpenters to join
those who are now busy below amidst a fine odour of
fresh deal and the cheery sound of hammer, chisel, and
plane. One of our young friends of the wooden legs—a
strapping fellow of seventeen—is just deftly finishing
off a very attractive chest of drawers, which will only
need to be taken to the painting and varnishing rooms
that form a part of the new building to be a very
capital example of the workmanship of the establishment.
For it cannot be too strongly insisted on that the
customers of the Industrial Cripples get value for their
money, whether it be in ornamental stationery, in plain
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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