In the investigation that followed the baby's arrival, there was found, pinned to his dirty pink frock, the identical coloured print of Robin Redbreast, after which the children had called him This print had been cut out of the book of birds, and fastened on the baby's dress on the sly, by Phil, for the purpose of annoying Patty; but the use of it now was, that when the chaplain came to baptize the child, he called him Robin; and this pretty name, joined to his pretty face, helped to make the child a favourite, even in so poor a place as the workhouse infirmary. There were numbers of babies in all the wards of the workhouse infirmary--babies of poor deserted mothers, orphan babies, babies of the honest but half-starving poor, babies also--and there were many of these--of idle, drunken, and reckless parents, who looked upon the workhouse as a provident club, very useful for a day of need. The babies, as a rule, came and went with their mothers, the orphans and deserted children alone making a home of the workhouse infirmary.* * George Hartley, author of "The Parish Net," says, that in England alone, 18,000 children are annually deserted and taken to the workhouses of the country. It was not a cheerful place for a young life to open in--by no means a cheerful place; the spirits of pauperism and dependence were too much about, and the sick and dying were too near the little lives that should hardly know just yet what sickness and dying meant. But though not a good place, by no means the place we would choose to bring up our own babies in, there might have been worse abodes for the dawning of life even than the workhouse infirmary. It was decidedly a good thing for Robin that his father had laid him down outside those stern-looking black doors, for what his life would have been brought up in Blind Alley, deprived of his mother, no words can say. The other little Timbses, starved as they undoubtedly were, in their babyhood at least were caressed, and largely blessed with a whole wealth of mother love poured out upon them by the poor faithful heart now in its grave. But Robin would have been starved without the love, so the workhouse was a much better place for him. There at least he was clothed and fed, and in a measure, and after a fashion, well taken care of. His life, begun thus smoothly, might have gone on to its fitting close. He might have gone through the usual career of a pauper child--in process of time joined his brothers and sisters at the pauper school at Paul's Gate; in process of time also, have been apprenticed to a trade, and have eventually turned out, with the thousands of paupers, badly--or again, with the thousands of paupers, well; for after all that has been said and written against them, the pauper schools train perhaps as well on the monster system, as any other schools on the monster system, all such systems being, however, directly contrary to nature, and therefore bad. CHAPTER II.