Look at the babies at dinner. They have brought their bread and butter with them, and they sit at the little low table enjoying it thoroughly. In the winter, when work is scarce, alas! baby's bread and butter is not always so thick as it is today. Sometimes baby has only a dry crust. But there is a lot of the best sort of Christian character knocking about in the Great City, and an excellent society, which provides dinners for poor Board School children, has done much to alleviate this painful state of things. A starving body, a famished child; there is no fear of imposture here; and if anyone who reads these chapters wishes to support a truly admirable movement, where there is no fear of abuse, he or she may imitate Captain Cuttle, and, _having found a good thing, make a note of it_. In addition to the dining and play-table there is a long bed in the room. There the tired babies sleep eight or ten in a row sometimes, and forget their baby troubles. The _crèche_ is a boon and a blessing to the poor woman who going out to work has a choice of keeping an elder girl at home to nurse the baby and be summoned for it, or locking the said baby up alone in a room all day with the risk to its life and its limbs inevitable to such a course, not to mention the danger of fire and matches and fits. It is therefore with grief I hear that there are to be no more built in Board Schools, and that the cost of maintaining those existing must in future be defrayed by voluntary contributions. The Government objects to the _crèche_ department on economical grounds. The lady who manages the infants old enough to learn has no easy task, but the order is perfect, and the children drill like little soldiers. Here, too, the stories of many of them reveal a depth of misery not often sounded except in the police-courts. Here I see a bright, pretty, golden-haired girl of five who rather upsets my pet theory. She ought to be ugly and dull, if there is anything in breed. Her mamma is seldom out of prison for more than a week. Mamma, not having learned Latin, does not know the difference between _meum_ and _tuum,_ and is an incorrigible shoplifter and thief. When she is enjoying her liberty, too, she has a habit of tumbling about which is not conducive to health. She has fallen out of a window and damaged the pavement below, and once with a baby in her arms she fell down the stairs of this very school. When they picked her up the baby's collar-bone was broken, but she was sound enough to exclaim, 'If it hadn't ha' been for that blessed baby I'd a broken my neck, I would.' It isn't every mother who is philosopher enough to recognise the use of a baby in breaking her fall downstairs. The father of this little girl is a respectable man; but he has to go a long way for work, and when papa is in the country and mamma is in gaol, some good Sisters of Charity have taken the child and found it a home.