"OXFORD HOUSE"--THE PRESENT BUILDING.] "But we very nearly didn't come." "Why not?" I asked. "Oh! You see, a man down our street, 'e said, 'Don't go--the Rector only wants to show you a few old gravestones.' But we tell 'im now we couldn't have enjoyed ourselves better if we'd been at Marlborough 'Ouse." Then the children of East London are truly delightful. Poor little bairns! they often get pale enough spending the year in those crowded courts and alleys--and few things are doing better work in London than the Children's Country Holiday Fund, which sends about thirty-one thousand each year for a fortnight into the country--but still nothing daunts their spirits or dims their affection. Often have I been cheered through an afternoon's visiting by a group of children who would spend their half-holiday afternoon in waiting quite quietly outside a sick-room in order to knock at the door of the next sick case to which they were quite 'cute enough to know that I was going, and so on right down the street. Many of the clergy organise Band of Hope entertainments, and teach the children to act little plays of their own, and there are no quicker and apter pupils than the children of East London, as the prizes carried off yearly at the Crystal Palace will show. The East-End boy, again, is quite a character; we had four hundred at Oxford House in one club, besides some hundreds of others in brigades. When you told an East-End mother that fact, she would generally say, "My word, I find _one_ quite enough!" And certainly, on a Whit Monday, when one had at least a hundred and fifty to convoy to London Bridge and get safely down to some friend's house and back again, they were a fine handful. [Illustration: (_Photo: Cassell and Co., Ltd._) THE PEOPLE'S PALACE.] One day I noticed the express stopping pretty often, and wondered why, as it was not advertised to stop anywhere. At last the guard came to see me at a wayside station, with a very red face, and said he would hold me responsible for what my boys were doing; he said that they had pulled the danger connecting-rod three times. I went round to see what was happening, and asked whether any of them had done it. "Oh, yes," said a little chap at once; "it was me; _I was only 'anging my 'at up on it!_"