Not to take away its life, but to hand it over to the State. He had heard of such things being done. He could carry the new baby to the workhouse--not to a very near workhouse--and leave him there. Just outside the workhouse doors, in a place where he would be certain to be seen, he could leave him. He never thought of a search being instituted--of the missing child being asked for; his brain was too much addled, too much confused, to connect danger to himself in the act. He considered the idea a cunning and clever one; an idea by which he could get rid of this unwelcome addition to his family. And the baby would be provided for by the State; much better off too; he rubbed his hands over the thought. By this time his transient sorrow for Sally had departed, and he was only anxious to take away the baby before the other children should awake. Molly, stretched on some straw on the floor, slept, too weary to stir; and the new baby lay in her arms and cried. He was hungry, and, deprived of his mother's love and mother's care, life in its first dawning was hardly pleasant to him. Timbs had no difficulty in removing the baby from Molly's arms. He wrapped a tattered shawl about him, and laid him down, while he fumbled for his own hat, by the side of the dead woman. The dead mother's face had a smile on it, and even in death she would have welcomed her child; the father, all the heart in him swallowed up by the Dolphin, now in life rejected him. It was not five o'clock yet, when Timbs, carrying the baby, went out. There were few people about; he chose unfrequented paths; he was hardly noticed. The little bundle in his arms, soothed by the motion, forgot its hunger, and went to sleep. Timbs selected a workhouse quite in the east-end, and a long way off. Outside the heavy and dreary black doors he laid the baby. PART II. _WHAT WE DID FOR HIM._ "'I bid,' said Beggary, howling, 'I bid for them, one and all! I'll teach them a thousand lessons-- To lie, to skulk, to crawl!'" CHARLES MACKAY --_Souls of the Children._ CHAPTER I. "_WE PLACED HIM IN THE HOME PROVIDED BY US FOR SUCH CASES._" Robin having been thus early in life deprived of both his parents--of his mother by death, of his father by desertion--it became our duty to provide for him. He, being bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh, must not be left to starve and die; we must start him in life with at least a fair chance of success; and being obliged to stand _in loco parentis_ to this baby, we placed him in the home provided by us for such cases. We gave of our money, that Robin and other orphans and permanently deserted children might be brought up, until the age of sixteen, in the workhouse. We did not do this willingly. It is the first duty in life that parents should provide for their own children, and with this law we, as Britons, never like to interfere.