Look at this little creature, whose pet name of Fairy bespeaks the loving care which her destitute babyhood calls forth; she is only ten months old, and her mother is but nineteen, the widow of a sailor lost at sea two months before the baby was born. Katie, of the adult age of five years, is the child of a man who works on barges. Rosie, one of the first inmates, has a drunken dock-labourer for a father, and her mother is dead. Dicky represents the children whose father, going out to sea in search of better fortune for wife and children, is no more heard of, and is supposed to be dead. "The King" is fatherless, and his mother works in a bottle-warehouse. The pathetic stories of {121} these children is told by Mrs. Hilton herself, in the little simple reports of this most admirable charity. They are so touching, that I cannot hope to reproduce them in any language so likely to go straight to the heart as that in which you may read them for yourself if you will either visit the Crèche, or send ever so small a donation, and ask for a copy of the modest brown-covered little chronicle of these baby-lives. Standing here in the two nurseries, where the dolls and Noah's arks, the pictures and the doves, nay, even the baby-jumpers suspended from the ceilings, are but accessories to the clasp of loving arms and the softly-spoken words of tender womanly kindness, I wonder why all one side of Stepney Causeway has not been demanded by a discriminating public for the extension of such an institution. Loitering in the lower room, where one little bright face is lifted up to mine, as the tiny hands pluck at my coat-skirt, and another chubby fist is busy with my walking-stick, I begin to think of the workhouse ward, where mothers are separated from their children night and day; of a prison, where I have seen a troop of little boys, and a flogging-room provided by a beneficent Government for the recognition by the State of children who had qualified themselves for notice by the commission of what the law called crime. A pleasant odour of minced beef, gravy, and vegetables, known as "Irish stew," begins to steal upon the air. The wooden benches in one of the rooms are suddenly turned back, and like a conjuring trick, convert themselves into tiny arm-chairs, with convenient trays in front for plates and spoons. The little voices—forty like one—strike up a fresh chant, and a whisper of rice-pudding is heard. So we go out, wondering still, and with a {122} wish that from every nursery where children lisp "grace before meat," some gracious message could be brought to aid and strengthen those who believe with me that the most profitable investment of political economy, the most certain effort of philanthropy, is to begin with the men and women of the future, and so abate the fearful threatenings of coming pauperism, and the still more terrible menace of a permanent "criminal class."