We have made our notes, and the children file out of school to dinner and to play. One sturdy little chap takes his sister's hand and leads her out like a little father. He has over half a mile to take her home. We are told it is a beautiful sight to see him piloting her across the great thoroughfares when the traffic sweeps wildly up and down, and never leaving go the little hand that is placed so trustingly in his till home is reached and the dangers of the streets are over. They are a pretty pair as they toddle ont hand in hand, and they form a pleasant picture in this brief sketch of the little scholars who come daily from the garrets and, cellars of the slums to get that 'little learning' which in their cases is surely the reverse of a 'dangerous thing.' CHAPTER VII. |If I were asked to say off-hand what was the greatest curse of the poor and what was the greatest blessing, I think my answer to the first query would be the public-house, and to the second the hospital. Of course, I might be wrong. There are some people who will contend that in these islands the greatest blessing of the natives of all degrees is that they are Great Britons. Our patriotic songs bid us all rejoice greatly at the fact, and patriotism is not a class privilege. The starved outcast, crouching for shelter on a wild March night in one of the stone recesses of London Bridge, has a right to exclaim with the same pride as the Marquis of Westminster--= ```'Far as the breeze can bear the billows' foam, ```Survey our empire and behold our home.'= His soul, for all we know, may rejoice greatly that Britannia rules the waves, and in spite of the fact that a policeman, spying him out as 'without the visible means of subsistence,' may seize him and consign him to durance vile, he--the outcast, not the policeman--may ponder with much national vanity on the fact that Britons never shall be slaves. Out upon the parochial-minded disciples of the Birmingham school, who pretend that a nation can be very great abroad and yet very small at home! 'Survey our empire' is a noble line, and there is another about the Queen's morning drum which has a magnificent ring about it, and crops up in patriotic leading articles about twice a week all the year round. It is, however, just possible that the vast extent of British rule does not come home so pleasurably to my friend on the bridge as it does to the well-fed, prosperous citizen of Jingo proclivities who believes that Heaven's first command to an Englishman was, 'Thou shalt remove thy neighbour's landmark.' The poor wretch may 'survey' his 'empire' with a feeling of anything but contentment, and he may be tempted to wish that we had a little less empire to look after abroad in order that a little attention might be bestowed upon the place where charity begins.