The policy of the authorities, says Mrs. Hilton, in her interesting narrative of the Crèche, in stopping outdoor relief to poor widows with children is causing much sorrow. The 2s. 6d. or 3s. received from the parish secured their rent, and they managed, with shirt-making or trouser-finishing, to earn a bare subsistence; but now the battle for a mere existence is terrible. Doubtless, the children would be better cared for in the House, but mothers cannot be persuaded to give them up. One such case has just passed under my notice; but the woman shall speak for herself. "'Oh, Mrs. Hilton, they have taken off my relief!—I, with four little ones who cannot even put on their shoes and stockings. They offer me the House; but I never can give up my children. Look at baby; he is ten months old; his father died of small-pox six months before he was born; he was only ill five days.' I told her I was afraid she would not be able to earn enough to keep them all. 'Well,' she said, 'I must try—I will never go into the House.'" "But these women have very little feeling for their children, they are so low and brutalised." Are they? Let those who think so visit this Cradle Home, and witness the bearing of the mothers who come to take their little ones home, or to nurse the sucklings at intervals snatched from work. Let them hear what such {123} poor women will do for children not their own, even to the extent (as recently took place, in one instance, at least) of sharing with their less necessitous babes the natural sustenance that the mother cannot always give. Sixty-five children received daily and a hundred or more on the books, with space needed for many more than can be admitted; children who, some of them infants as they are, have learned to lisp profane oaths and babble in foul language, and to give way to furious outbursts of passion, the result of neglect and evil example, and the life of the street and the gutter. It is but a short time, however, before this strange dreadful phase of the distorted child mind disappears, and the pet name is bestowed along with the gentle kindness that obliterates the evil mimicry of sin. The baby taken home from this purer atmosphere of love becomes a messenger of grace to many a poor household, as the short annals of the Crèche will tell; and even the pet names themselves are adopted by the mothers in speaking of and to their own children. One short story from the first report sent out by Mrs. Hilton, and we will go our way with a hope that some words of ours may win a fresh interest for these little ones.