I want you to come with me to that eastern district of the great city which has for so long a time been associated with accounts of distress, of precarious earnings, homes without food or fire, scanty clothing, dilapidated houses, dire poverty and the diseases that come of cold and starvation. The place that I shall take you to is quite close to the Stepney Station of the North London Railway. The district is known as Ratcliff; the streets down which we shall pass are strangely destitute of any but small shops, where a front "parlour" window contains small stocks of chandlery or of general cheap odds and ends. The doorways of the houses are mostly open, and are occupied by women and children, of so poor and neglected an appearance, that we need {101} no longer wonder at the constant demands made upon the institution which we are about to visit. Just here the neighbourhood seems to have come to a dreary termination at the brink of the river, and to be only kept from slipping into the dark current by two or three big sheds and wharves, belonging to mast, rope, and block-makers, or others connected with that shipping interest the yards of which are, many of them, deserted, no longer resounding to the noise of hammers. The black spars and yards of vessels alongside seem almost to project into the roadway as we turn the corner and stand in front of a building, scarcely to be distinguished from its neighbours, except for the plain inscription on its front, "East London Hospital for Children and Dispensary for Women," and for a rather more recent appearance of having had the woodwork painted. But for this there would be little more to attract attention than might be seen in any of the sail-makers' dwellings, stores, and lofts in the district; and, in fact, the place itself is—or rather was—a sail-maker's warehouse, with trap-doors in the rough and foot-worn floors, steep and narrow stairs, bulks and baulks of timber here and there in the heavy ceilings and awkward corners, not easily turned to account in any other business. Some of these inconveniences have been remedied, and the trap-doors as well as the awkwardest of the corners and the bulks have been either removed or adapted to present purposes, for the business is to provide a home and careful nursing for sick children, and the long rooms of the upper storeys are turned into wards, wherein stand rows of Lilliputian iron bedsteads, or tiny cribs, where forty boys and girls, some of them not only babes but sucklings, form the present contingent of the hundred and {102} sixty little ones who have been treated during the year. Not a very desirable-looking residence you will say, but there are a good many inmates after all; and the scrupulous cleanliness of the place, as seen from the very passage, is an earnest of that plan of making the best of things which has always been characteristic of this hospital at Ratcliff Cross. Some eight or nine grownup folks, and from thirty to forty children, make a