There is a cradle within the door of one of the great institutions of New York before which a constantly recurring tragedy is being enacted. It is a plain cradle, quite simply draped in white, but with such a look of cozy comfort about it that one would scarcely suspect it to be a cradle of sorrow. A little white bed with a neatly turned-back coverlet is made up within it. A long strip of white muslin, tied in a tasteful bow at the top, drapes its rounded sides. About it, but within the precincts of warmth and comfort, of which it is a fort, spreads a chamber of silence—a quiet, solemn, plainly furnished room, the appearance of which emphasizes the peculiarity of the cradle itself. If the mind were not familiar with the details with which it is so startlingly associated, the question would naturally arise as to what it was doing there—why it should be standing there alone. No one seems to be watching it. It has not the slightest appearance of usefulness, and yet there it stands, day after day, and year after year—a ready prepared cradle and no infant to live in it. And yet this cradle is the most useful and, in a way, the most inhabited cradle in the world. Day after day, and year after year, it is the recipient of more small wayfaring souls than any other cradle in the world. In it the real children of sorrow are placed, and over it more tears are shed than if it were an open grave. It is the place where annually 1,200 foundlings are placed, many of them by mothers who are too helpless or too unfortunately environed to be further able to care for their child, and the misery which compels it makes of the little open crib a cradle of tears. The interest of this particular cradle is, that it has been the silent witness of more truly heartbreaking scenes than any other cradle since the world began. For nearly thirty-five years it has stood where it does today, ready-draped, open, while as many thousand mothers have stolen shamefacedly in and, after looking hopelessly about, have laid their helpless offspring within its depths. For thirty-five years, winter and summer, in the bitterest cold and the most stifling heat, it has seen them come—the poor, the rich; the humble, the proud; the beautiful, the homely—and one by one they have laid their children down and brooded over them, wondering whether it were possible for human love to make so great a sacrifice and yet not die. And then when the child has been actually sacrificed, when by the simple act of releasing their hold upon it and turning away they have actually allowed it to pass out from their love and tenderness into the world unknown, this silent cradle has seen them smite their hands in anguish and yield to such voiceless tempests of grief as only those know who have loved much and lost all.