Only just now I asked you to go with me to Ratcliff to see the forty tiny beds ranged in the rooms {113} of that old sail-maker's warehouse which has been converted into a Hospital for Sick Children. There is something about this neighbourhood of Eastern London that keeps us lingering there yet; something that may well remind us of that star which shone above the manger at Bethlehem where the Babe lay. The glory of the heavenly light has led wise men and women to see how, in reverence for the childlikeness, they may work for the coming of the kingdom, and those who enter upon this labour of love, begin—without observation—to find what that kingdom really is, and to realise more of its meaning in their own hearts. To the cradle in a manger the wise men of old went to offer gifts. To a cradle I would ask you to go with me to-day; to a whole homeful of cribs; which is known by a word that means crib and manger and cradle all in one—"The Crèche." There is something, as it seems to me, appropriate in this French word to the broad thoroughfare (so like one of the outer boulevards of Paris) out of which we turn when we have walked a score or two of yards from the Stepney Station, or where some other visitors alight from the big yellow tramway car running from Aldgate to Stepney Causeway. The Causeway itself is a clean, quiet street, and is so well known that the first passer-by can point it out to you, while, if the inhabitants of the district can't quite master the crunch of the French word, they know well enough what you mean when you ask for the "babies' home," or for "Mrs. Hilton's nursery." The home itself is but a baby institution, for it is only five years old, but it might be a very Methuselah if it were to be judged by the tender, loving care it has developed, and the good it has effected, not only on behalf of the {114} forty sucklings who are lying in their neat little wire cots upstairs, like so many human fledglings in patent safety cages, and for the forty who are sprawling and toddling about in the lower nursery, or for the contingent who are singing a mighty chorus of open vowels on the ground-floor; but also in the hopeful aid and tender sympathy it has conveyed to the toiling mothers who leave their little ones here each morning when they go out to earn their daily bread, and fetch them again at night, knowing that they are fresh and clean, and have been duly nursed and fed, and put to sleep, and had their share of petting and of play.