It was at Christmas-tide seven years ago that I first visited the hospital, and there were then very pleasant evidences of the season to be discovered in all kinds of festive ornament in the long wards, and especially in the smaller rooms, where this loving woman had attracted other loving women around her, as nurses to the suffering little ones; and was there and then engaged in the superintendence of a glorious Christmas-tree. But the time came when the hoped-for support having arrived, Mr. and Mrs. Heckford felt that they could leave the family of forty children to the care of those who had taken up the work with heartfelt sympathy. They had laboured worthily and well, but, alas!—the reward came late—late at least for him, who had been anxious to take his wife away to some warmer climate, in an endeavour to restore the strength that had been spent in the long effort to rear a permanent refuge for sick children in that dense neighbourhood. It was he who stood nearest to shadow-land,—he who was soonest to enter into the light and the rest that lay beyond. Mr. Heckford died, I believe, at Margate, after a short period of leisure and travel, which his wife shared with him. His picture, presented by her to the charity which they both founded, is to be seen in the boys' ward. Another portrait of him—a portrait in words written by the late Mr. Charles Dickens, who visited and pathetically described {106} the children and their hospital in December, 1868, conveys the real likeness of the man. "An affecting play was acted in Paris years ago, called the Children's Doctor. As I parted from my Children's Doctor now in question, I saw in his easy black necktie, in his loose-buttoned black frock-coat, in his pensive face, in the flow of his dark hair, in his eyelashes, in the very turn of his moustache, the exact realisation of the Paris artist's ideal as it was presented on the stage. But no romancer that I know of has had the boldness to prefigure the life and home of this young husband and wife, in the Children's Hospital in the East of London." What the hospital was then, it has remained—but with such improvements as increased funds and a more complete organisation have effected. It is still the ark of refuge for those little ones who, smitten with sudden disease, or slowly fading before the baleful breath of famine or of fever, or ebbing slowly away from life by the fatal influences that sap the constitutions of the young in such neighbourhoods, are taken in that they may be brought back to life, or at worst may be lovingly tended, that the last messenger may be made to bear a smile.