Its story is almost too well known to need repetition: A seventeenth-century sea-captain, living during the latter half of his life in Rotherhithe, was distressed by the sight of deserted children he saw on his way to and from the city. It took good Captain Thomas Coram seventeen years of hard work to turn his dream of a well-endowed hospital for deserted children into a reality, but in 1739 he got a royal charter and a house was opened for them in Hatton Garden. The Foundling Hospital, as we know it, was begun in 1742. Hogarth has painted a wonderful portrait of the founder, and looking at the cheerful benevolent face one can understand why he wrote, “The portrait I painted with the utmost pleasure and in which I particularly wished to excel was that of Captain Coram for the Foundling Hospital.” The kindly eyes that Hogarth drew were forever seeing something to be done for his fellow men, for the Foundling Hospital was only one of the old sea-captain’s philanthropies, to which he literally gave away all he had. In his old age, when he was asked if he would mind accepting a pension collected from his friends, he said quite simply, “I have not wasted the little wealth of which I was formerly possessed in self-indulgence or vain expenses, and am not ashamed to confess that in this my old age I am poor.” He accepted a pension of a little more than £100, and is buried in the vaults under the Foundling Hospital Chapel. That is the story of Thomas Coram, whose statue is at the entrance gate and whose name is remembered in Great Coram Street and Little Coram Street. The best time to see the hospital is at the Sunday morning service at eleven o’clock, and the easiest way to reach it is by the tube to Russell Square. Turn to the right on leaving the tube and walk down Grenville Street and Guilford Street, and the Foundling Hospital will be seen to the left. Go up to the gallery if you want to see the children seated on each side of the organ, dressed in the quaint costume that has never altered since it was decreed by the founder. Dickens, who loved the hospital and had a seat in the chapel during the ten years he lived in Bloomsbury, makes Mrs. Meagles say in _Little Dorrit_: Oh, dear, dear, ... when I saw all those children ranged tier above tier, and appealing from the father none of them has ever known on earth, to the great Father of us all in Heaven, I thought, does any wretched mother ever come here, and look among those young faces, wondering which is the poor child she brought into this forlorn world. But the rules of the Foundling Hospital have changed since Thomas Coram’s time. Only the children of known mothers are now received, and [Illustration: FOUNDLING HOSPITAL]