There is no need to comment on the effect of such impressions on a child’s vivid imagination; it is altogether dreadful and disastrous, for who can tell what damaging results to the brain may be in store for the innocent little victim! Time and care, with healthful surroundings and healing influences, may do much to eliminate the evil and disperse the horror and cruelty of such experiences--and this is why the “St. Nicholas Home” exists to-day, thanks to the loving heart and patience of its founder, Mrs. Kimmins, whose tenderness for children makes one feel that Her guardian angel, as well as the angels who watch over Christ’s little ones, must always “behold the Face of the Father.” No one with even a small amount to spare from the multitudinous claims made on the pocket of the unfortunate British taxpayer, whose Governments have dragged him into the incredible wickedness of a war for which he had neither the taste nor the inclination, will refuse that mite to assist the work of the “good Saint Nicholas” in the home over which his childhood-loving spirit presides, while those who are making much of the “filthy lucre” out of the exigencies and demands of the nations’ slaughter-houses will perchance salve conscience by munificence. Some of the donors may call to mind the story of the father who murdered his three sons, and whose crime St. Nicholas discovered in a vision. Going to the inn where the murderer was, the saint forced him to confess his wickedness, and forthwith raised the three boys to life again. In this legend we may find a happy symbol for the “Home” on whose behalf we plead. For the “raid-shock” children are, in a sense, murdered, though alive--murdered in their natural confidence, hope, and gaiety, and crushed by the oppressive consciousness of an ever-looming evil. We wish, as St. Nicholas did with the three boys, to raise them to life again--to re-establish their youthful trust, to make them forget that there are men who are devils--but perhaps to persuade them that there are women who are angels! Women, with mothers’ hearts, ready to put mothers’ arms round them--to play with them and talk “fairy bits”--as a sweet little girl asked me to do the other day--women who will care for them and see that nothing scares them from their healthful sleep at night, or their innocent games by day. This is the object of our appeal for “St. Nicholas Home”--a worthy cause--a noble, humane, and sacred cause, for we must “take heed” that we “offend not one of these little ones.” And most earnestly do I join with all who have put their shoulders to the wheel of this great Car of good effort steadily going a stiff way uphill--a strong push, a big push, and a push all together, and we shall stand on the shining summit of success with our saved children gathered round us in the light of happier days! APPEAL FOR THE FRENCH RED CROSS (_Written for the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre, July, 1918_)