The Children's Book of LondonMitton, G. E. (Geraldine Edith)
History
The Children's Book of London
Mitton, G. E. (Geraldine Edith)
London (England) -- Description and travel -- Juvenile literature
There are other hospitals for children, which are for all sorts of
illnesses and not only for incurable ones. There is one in Chelsea, not
far from here, and another, a very large one, in Great Ormond Street,
not very far from the school for sick children.
In the Great Ormond Street one they take in the very tiniest babies, and
so the nurses have plenty to do looking after these mites. Sometimes a
child is very naughty when it first comes in, and will do nothing but
scream and cry, and the nurses have to be very patient; but it always
happens that when it has been there for a time it loves them all so much
that it cries when it gets well and has to go home. It is a funny sight
to see a nurse or a sister having tea with perhaps three or four
children who are well enough to be up. They climb all over her like
little kittens, and love her so much she cannot get rid of them. In this
hospital each ward is named after some member of the Royal Family:
Helena Ward, Alice Ward, and so on, after the Princesses Helena and
Alice, daughters of Queen Victoria.
There is a home for cripple girls in London, and another for cripple
boys in a part of the West End called Kensington. Here the boys are
taken in and taught, not only lessons, but all kinds of things that boys
can do without having to walk. Some are tailors, and some make harness
for carriage-horses, and some carve wood, and learn carpentering or
shoemaking. And so they can earn their own living when they grow up to
be men. They all seem very happy, and when you meet them on a walk it is
a touching sight; but yet not really sad, because their faces are bright
and happy. Fancy meeting twenty or thirty boys going along together,
every one of them lame or deformed in some way! Some go on crutches, and
some hobble, and others limp; but they do not seem to mind, because,
perhaps, they have never known what it is to be active like other boys,
and there are plenty of pleasant things they can still do.
CHAPTER VIII
STREETS AND SHOPS
When I asked a little girl who was visiting London for the first time if
it was like what she had expected, she said, 'No,' and when I asked how
it differed from the idea she had had, she said: 'I expected to see long
rows and rows of houses, going on for miles and miles, but I never
thought there would be so many things in the streets--cabs and omnibuses
and people; it's all so much fuller and gayer than I thought.'
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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