It is a sight well worth the seeking of any philanthropic person interested in the present condition and possible future of the infant labour market. How much or how little of truth there may be in the lament one occasionally hears, that our endurance is failing us, and that we seldom reach the ripe old age attained by our ancestors, we will not here discuss; at least there can be no doubt of this—that we grow old much earlier than did our great grandfathers; and though our “three-score years and ten” may be shortened by fifteen or twenty years, the downhill portion of our existence is at least as protracted as that of the hale men of old who could leap a gate at sixty. This must be so, otherwise the ancient law, defining an infant as “a person under the age of fourteen,” could never have received the sanction of legislators. Make note of these “infants” of the law as they come in knots of two and three, and sometimes in an unbroken “gang,” just as they left the factory, putting their best feet foremost in a match against time; for all that is allowed them is one hour, and within that limited period they have to walk perhaps a couple of miles to and fro, resting only during that brief space in which it is their happy privilege to exercise their organs of mastication. Good times indeed were those olden ones, if for no other reason than that they knew not such infants as these! Of the same stuff in the main, one and all, but by no means of the same pattern. Haggard, weary-eyed infants, who never could have been babies; little slips of things, whose heads are scarcely above the belt of the burly policeman lounging out his hours of duty on the bridge, but who have a brow on which, in lines indelible, are scored a dreary account of the world’s hard dealings with them. Painfully puckered mouths have these, and an air of such sad, sage experience, that one might fancy, not that these were young people who would one day grow to be old women, but rather that, by some inversion of the natural order of things, they had once been old and were growing young again—that they had seen seventy, at least, but had doubled on the brow of the hill of age, instead of crossing it, and retraced their steps, until they arrived back again at thirteen; the old, old heads planted on the young shoulders revealing the secret.