There are several foundling hospitals and rescue homes for women in Melbourne, but of these I am intimate with the working of but one—which for sheer humanity and complete realization of the claims of motherhood, apart from any other consideration, beats everything of the sort that I ever came across—and this is the Infant Asylum in Berry Street. A girl who has got into trouble may apply at this asylum six or seven months before her hour of trial has come. She is taken in, fed and clothed, and—most merciful of all—given work to do, nobody, excepting the committee and matron, ever knowing her surname. When her time comes she goes to the Women’s Hospital for her confinement; and after that is over returns to the Home, to help in the general work, and to nurse and care for her own child. The value of this is scarcely to be estimated. The poor little mite is unfortunate enough as it is in possessing but one palpable parent, and being born under the stigma that—even in so free a country as Australia—is still attached to the completely innocent. If it is then taken from its mother and put straight into a foundling hospital, that mother’s whole memory of it will be so mingled with a nightmare of horror, and pain, and shame, that all she wishes for is to be able to forget its very existence; and so the poor mite is doubly orphaned. But I defy any mother—however reluctant—if she has but a spark of good in her, to suckle her child for a year or more, and not only feel bound to it by both love and duty, but capable of starting life again none the worse, and in many cases much the better—because more completely a woman—on account of its existence. When the mother leaves the asylum, where she may stay for as long as two years, she is found a situation, and expected to contribute a percentage of her wages to the support of the baby who remains in the Home; unless, as is very often the case, she is allowed to have it with her; many people being quite willing—particularly in up-country districts where servants are scarce—to take a woman with a child, who as often as not becomes the pet of the entire household.