But at the time these events happened there was one remnant of beautiful nature left on Blackwell's Island--one spot where the flowers were permitted to bloom in the pure breath of heaven--where the trees were yet rooted to the earth, and filled as of old, with the music of summer birds. On the very centre of the island stood an old mansion house, the residence of its proprietor before the paradise became city property. It was a rambling old building, with wings of unequal length shaded with magnificent willows, and surrounded by shrubbery, and pretty lawns, interspersed with fine old trees. Terraces beautifully lifted from the water's edge; and gravel walks, bordered with the thickest and heaviest box-myrtle, with here and there a grape arbor spanning them with its leafy arch, sloped with picturesque beauty to the river which washed both sides of the island. A neglected and rude old place it was, but perhaps the more lovely for that. Neglect only seemed to give richer luxuriance to every thing around; the hedges and rose-thickets were tangled together. Great snow-ball trees, trumpet vines and honeysuckles seemed to shoot out more rigorously from want of pruning, and the trees had become majestic with age. From the broad hall you might see the river on either hand, gleaming through the spreading branches. Now and then a snow-white sail glided by, and at sunset the water seemed heaving up waves of gold wherever your eye turned. This was the Children's Hospital. In the low chambers, and the fine old fashioned rooms, from two hundred and fifty to three hundred children lay upon their little cots, in all stages of suffering to which infancy is subject. It was a painful scene--those helpless little creatures, orphaned, or worse than orphaned, in the morning of life, wearing such looks of pain, and yet so patient. God help them! It was a touching sight to watch the brightening of those little faces, whenever the good matron passed into the wards ministering to their comfort--poor things--by a kind look and soothing word, where medicine might often less avail. Strange manifestations of character might be witnessed among those little creatures--fortitude that might shame a warrior--patience the most saintlike; and again--but why dwell upon the evil that sometimes exhibits itself fullgrown, in the heart of an infant? If cries of bitter passion sometimes arose from those little couches they came, alas! from hearts that had never learned that unrestrained passion was a sin. If fierce words were wrung from those infant lips, it was that anger, not kindness had been showered on them from the cradle. To some of these little creatures oaths had been familiar as caresses are to the infancy of others. Such was their household language.