in height from the deck, as they would have been for ordinary seamen, and it was suggested that the little fellows would find a difficulty in getting into them at that height. The matter was solved, however, by their all leaping in when piped to bed with infinite delight, the saltatory difficulty evidently adding an additional charm to the sleeping arrange. ment Fancy a street Arab not being able to climb anything! Captain Alstead looked upon his lively little lot with eyes of real pride, and gave it as his opinion that in a couple of years most of them would be afloat, many as ordinary seamen, and all earning their own living. What more promising material than these boys as sailors for the Royal Navy? But, alas! the red tape of the Admiralty here again comes into play. Boys can only be admitted into that service on production of the register of their birth; as though two-thirds of the poor destitute children in the streets, the greater portion of whom are illegitimate, knew anything about registers, even if their mothers ever possessed them. 1 One would fancy that the spirit of adven ture which runs in the blood of these castaways would have made them especially eligible for Her Majesty's sea service; and so we trust it will byand-by, when common intelligence enters into the arrangements of the authorities at Whitehall. All the boys on board are dressed in the open blue woollen shirt of the man-of-war's man, and when the writer saw them, were holystoning the under deck with a will. It is the intention of the Committee to increase the number of boys on board from 50 to 200, the large size of the frigate and the splendid flush decks giving ample room for that number or more. The lads will learn the whole duty of a thorough seaman. It will be remem bered that the training-ship belonging to the Naval College at Greenwich is on dry land, in the garden in front of the Hospital, and for the protection of the lads in training, a large netting is stretched some twenty feet from the ship's deck to catch any of them that may happen to lose their footing when going aloft. This precaution against accidents is dispensed with on board the "Chichester," as it is found that the absence of the netting when the lads get into actual service makes them timid. Some years since, the Government were inclined to lend a helping hand to these refuges, which are doing the work it should accomplish itself. In 1858 the Privy Council allowed the Association half the rent, half the salaries of the master and industrial teachers, one-third the cost of the raw material used in the industrial school, and a capitation grant of five shillings a year for every boy. This is now entirely withheld, and the Association has to depend entirely upon private liberality for doing the real work of the State, namely, clearing our streets of the raw material out of which thieves and prostitutes are inevitably produced. The State spends annually hundreds of thousands upon the gaols and penitentiaries throughout the country for the punishment of crime, and gives but little to private associations for its prevention. The Government, it is true, say that if they give they must exercise supervision, and if this can be done as mildly as we find it done in the various industrial schools, no harm would come of it. As matters at present stand, the Committee ask for funds to accomplish the following objects: 1. To retain one hundred boys in the present Refuge. 2. To support a "training-ship," where at least 1 two hundred more boys may be educated and trained to a sea-faring life. 3. To establish a "country house," with about one hundred acres of land, where one hundred more boys may be trained to agricultural pursuits. As the annual expense of each boy is estimated at about 15., the total cost for four hundred will be about 60007., a sum which philanthropy may supply with the certainty that its contribution will be doing a work from which good fruit, without one single drawback, must inevitably be gathered. But the Boys' Refuge in Great Queen 'Street represents only one part of the operations of the Association. The Girls' Refuges, one in Broad Street, St. Giles's, and the other at Acton, each maintaining 40 children, are equally worthy of notice. The Home in Broad Street, St. Giles's, has the advantage of that for the boys in Great Queen Street, inasmuch as it is a new building, intended originally for a gin-palace, but bought in the carcass and fitted up roughly but sufficiently for the poor girls collected from the streets. A very excellent system of training is adopted in this Refuge to fit the children for domestic service. Of course all the operations of the house are done by themselves, but there is a special training which must exercise them more or less successfully, according to their ability, for the position of that "real treasure," a thoroughly good servant. The great want of domestics at the present time is thorough training. Any strong healthy girl thinks herself capable of taking a place now-a-days, forgetting that she has no right to learn her duties at the expense of her employer. At the Broad Street Home, on the contrary, they all go through a regular system of apprenticeship, if we may so term it, during which each girl is taught to do one single duty for the entire number of inmates for a week. Thus one week she has to attend to the gas arrangements, a matter our abigails are generally profoundly ignorant of; the next the duties of a parlour maid are performed; then the cookery week comes round, the bath-room arrangements, the scullery, the wardrobes, the knives and forks, and every detail of importance in a household is thus practically attended to on s large scale by every girl in her turn. Even that terrible nuisance the breaking habit, which accompanies some servants through life merely from carelessness, is provided against in this Refuge. All girls who are found to have an inveterate habit of this kind are made to pay for all damages out of the pocket-money that is given them. This has a wonderful effect in correcting the evil, and the habit of carefulness once acquired is not easily lost. The girls, like the boys, are taught reading, writing, and ciphering, and their principal occupation is plain sewing. They make the boys' shirts, and the boys in return make the girls' boots and shoes. When a girl has been trained she leaves for service; and if she should lose her place she returns to the Home for a time. It is this almost parental watchfulness and care for the girls which makes such homes as these Refuges so powerful for good. They never let a child pass out of mind wilfully, and it is this knowledge that they are welcome back again, even if they have been in trouble, that keeps so many of them straight in after life. When I visited the Broad Street Home, I found the girls, under the influence of cleanliness and good food, looking healthy and plump; a perfect transformation from the dirty squalid little things, tattered and torn, with broom in hand, as they came in just secured from some street-crossing. And the matron told me that the moral improvement after a little time is equally great, merely from the example set by the inmates who have been some time under discipline. Thus, many girls that set all the rules at defiance on first admission, who laugh at the other girls for showing shamefacedness for faults, and at the idea of paying any attention to bad marks, in a very short space of time are fully as open to shame as the others. When they have experienced kindness, then their hearts warm, and all the better qualities of their nature gradually thaw out, like the frozen notes in Munchausen's torn. Love, in fact, is the key which opens their affections. I have seen, with astonishment, the Little mouths of both boys and girls work for a moment and then tears pour from their eyes, at the bare mention of their poverty-stricken parents, and the hovels they once knew as homes. So much tenderness is there still left in those little ones who have been so badly entreated by the world. The little girl of the Piccadilly door-step, doubtless saved from inevitable death, now cleaned and warmly clothed, was among the other children; and there were several who, like her, had endured the bitter weather all night under arches and in market-basLite. The only difference between them and the boys is this respect was, that whereas the boys seemed eager to relate the hardships which they had endared, the girls seemed ashamed to confess them, In the sick-room, at my visit, there lay a poor young negress suffering from hip-joint disease. Mr. Williams, the founder of this great Institution (for it is great, measured by the good it does), and not only the founder, but the ever-watchful secretary, and the friend of the outcast likewise, whispered to me, as she lay with her picturesque patient face on the pillow beaming with the indescribable sweetcess of the Lybian Sphinx: "That girl was brought to me from Shadwell by a gentleman, who told me that her family for three generations had been prosti tutes, just to try if we could make an honest girl in the fourth generation at least." And I said, "From the look of the girl I think you will succeed." At Acton there is a similar Refuge, where the training is a little more advanced, to which the elder girls in Broad Street are removed, previous to their being sent to service. In this establishment the washing of all the inmates of the Refuge is done; in itself no slight work. There is another class of Home, however, which comes under the term Industrial School, and is somewhat similar in its scope to the Great Queen Street Refuge, but differs inasmuch as it is under Government inspection, and for certain cases receives money from the State. Unhappily, there are but two of these invaluable institutions; but the first established, the Boys' Home, Regent's Park Road, N. W., only requires more money to make it in the best sense of the word a real home to all destitute boys found about the streets of London. By the terms of the Industrial Schools Act, passed in 1866, any child apparently under the age of fourteen years, found wandering, and not having any place of abode, or any visible means of subsistence, or frequenting the company of reputed thieves, may be committed to any industrial school for any period not exceeding five years; and any parent or guardian may bring before a magistrate any child under fourteen years of age whom the parents or guardians are unable to control. And again, any child under twelve years of age, charged before a magistrate, punishable by imprisonment or less punishment, but who has not been convicted in England of felony, may be sent by him to an industrial school, and the State may be charged a sum of five shillings a week for his maintenance. This is letting in the thin end of the wedge; but there seems to be no objection to it. Destitute children' in all fairness should become a charge upon the State rather than upon the purses of the charitable and generous few; for the good these Homes do is to the community at large, and the community should pay for it. It The Boys' Home, Regent's Park Road, was the first certified Industrial School under this Act. Indeed there is only one other at the present time in the metropolis. This Home differs from the Refuge, inasmuch as many of the inmates sent here by the magistrates are legally detained for various terms, in some cases extending to five years. may be called a forced apprenticeship, with this difference, that the boys are soon taught to feel that the authority of the law is tempered with kindness and consideration. Poor children who have never known what a home is in the best sense of the term, and to whom the family feeling is unfamiliar, must experience a strange sensation at being transported from the hard service of the street, from the callous crowd of passers-by who are deaf to their cry for bread, and at finding themselves suddenly received with sympathy and kindness; no longer kicked and cuffed, but treated like children of the household-like one of those children they must have seen in their rambles inside the comfortable houses which to them appeared like Paradise. Conversing with the matron of this institution, a kind, motherly person, with true womanly instincts, I was not surprised to hear that on their first admission many of these little ones were even suspicious of the little attentions shown them: it all seemed too good to be true; a kind of stunned feeling took possession of them until they gradually gave way to what they found was the natural atmosphere of the place. Magistrate. How long have you been sleeping about the streets in this way? Frost. Oh, about half a year-no, three months. Magistrate. What do you do for a living? Magistrate. And where did you sleep last? Magistrate. No, I mean before you slept in the van? Magistrate. And who is your father? Hawkins. I ain't got a father, and mother's gone When we see the extraordinary fancies men will pursue, the time respectable gentlemen will devote to grow the largest cucumbers, the expense they will go to in order to cultivate pines finer than their neighbours, the labour even middle-away; she said she couldn't keep me no longer. aged men will encounter to climb a mountain-peak a thousand feet higher than has been done before ; the energy others will show in the pursuit of butterflies; when we notice these instances of devoted labour, I ask myself, Is there not something they might do more exciting than fussing about in a hothouse, or even freezing on Alpine peaks? What a glow of pleasure it gives a boy to read of the noble deeds of the wandering Caliph, and of how he raised up those who were in poverty! His pathway in this dark world looks like a line of light which could only exist in Arabian story; but, in truth, the meanest of us, with a kind heart and a willing mind, may act the part of the Caliph. The law gives us the power of taking any child out of the gutter, out of the society of thieves, out of poverty and dirt, and, by the aid of a magistrate, putting him in the path of an honourable life. Will none of our cucumbergrowers and butterfly-collectors turn their attention to nobler game, the rescue of human beings? We see by the papers that some members of the class which are generally supposed to live selfish and luxurious lives, have already set this better example. The Marquis Townshend has taken more than one poor starving little fellow to the magistrates; and we all know what the Earl of Shaftesbury has done for years in the same good cause. But there is much to be done, and many are required to help. Here, for instance, is a little episode, occurring in November last, at Worship Street Police Court, in which any of us, instead of the police, might have played the part of the good Caliph. Magistrate. When was that? Hawkins. Eh! About a month. Here were two children, ripe for the devil's sickle, luckily rescued and passed, under the new Act, into the Boys' Home. In an afternoon's walk we meet scores of such cases, but in too many instances we turn aside from these pitiable objects with a sense simply of annoyance at their importunities. It is from want of real knowledge that we do so. Hunger and cold are not things that can be dramatically shown. It is necessary to follow those poor little children to their homes to realise what they suffer; and it is further necessary to make an effort to relieve them, instead of solemnly comforting our selves with the assurance that "The poor ye always have with you." William Hawkins and William Frost, with naked feet and nearly naked bodies, were charged before Mr. Cooke with being found destitute in the public streets. Dolman, 119 H, deposed that he found the boys sleeping in an uncovered van. Magistrate. What time was it? The Honorary Secretary to the Park Road Institution says, in a note to the writer, I wish I had the power of a ready writer, that I might describe to you the horrid house in Seven-Star Alley, St. Giles's, out of which, ensconced under a filthy old four-post bed, I dragged one of our runaways, W. S., formerly the crossing-sweeper at the corner of Hey Hill, Berkeley Square, and now a fine trustworthy young man, under-gardener at Sir F. A.'s." I quote thus much of a very interesting communication for two reasons: that possibly some of the readers of this paper may remember the little boy from the description of his sweeping location; and, for the more important reason of showing the pains taken to recover backsliders, the love and forgiveness shown to what would appear like ingratitude on the part of the boys who, after having been taken care of in the Home, have run away. In looking over the registers of cases received into the Home, nothing has struck me more forcibly than the fact that in many cases the boys have run away again and again, have even gone away with money, but they have not necessarily been discarded from the Institution. Either the secretary has, with Magistrate (to the eldest boy). How old are you? much trouble, himself brought back the runaways, Frost. Going on for my eight. Magistrate. Where are your parents? or the other boys or the police have done it, and they have been received like the Prodigal Son. And what Frost. I ain't got none: father's dead, and mother's has been the fruit of this tender forbearance ? In gone away somewhere. nearly every case such boys have eventually turned out well. Some of the most promising boys now either serving her Majesty in the army and navy, or doing the work of sturdy colonists, are the very lads who so often absconded. There is splendid material in these wild and irregular young fellows, when once thoroughly conquered by kind and careful training; and it is this quality which Mr. Bell, the honorary secretary, prides himself upon, and justly so, in the management of the Boys' Home, When the overpowering necessity of State aid, in some form or other, to meet the gigantic nature of the juvenile destitution still existing notwithstanding the efforts made by philanthropists, comes to mind, our only fear is that with State machinery we should get, instead of such secretaries as Mr. Bell of the Home, and Mr. Williams of the Great Queen Street Refuge--gentlemen who work with their whole heart and soul for these little ones as they would indeed for their own children in the like distress-some formal official, working with the regularity, immovability, and want of feeling, of a mere machine. God forbid such a change! for it is the thorough human sympathy that constitutes most of the good of these institutions, and all their softening and improving influence. At the present time there are about sixty-five boys in the Home in the Regent's Park Road, These little fellows, varying in age from eight to sixteen, are not only taught reading, writing, and arithmetic, but the trades of brush-making, tailoring, cabinetmaking, and shoemaking; to mend their clothes, and to earn their food. We question indeed if, as colonists, they are not far better educated than the middle classes. Whilst in the institution many of them go out to work daily, as shoe-blacks and knife-cleaners, in some cases as errand-boys, returning to sleep at the Home; in which case the money earned goes towards their maintenance. As we have said before, when the children are without parents or friends, the Privy Council pays five shillings per week for their maintenance and education; but when the parents are living, the magistrate makes an order upon them for a weekly payment, according to their means. There are many children, again, sent by benevolent individuals on the payment of the Government rate of allowance of thirteen pounds per annum. When we see the sums of money some persons will give in the form of memorial windows to churches for mercies or benefits received in this life, we cannot help thinking that it would be far more profitable to make a memorial of some poor child rescued from vice and sin. We are sure that in the eyes of the Almighty it would be far more acceptable. For a trivial yearly sum any one may experience the luxury of lifting one poor child from the kennel, and it may be of giving themselves an interest in some human being which they never experienced before. If such a personal interest be not considered desirable, there is still pressing want of money to sustain the Home in its present position, and a desire, indeed a crying necessity, for its extension tenfold, which must in some measure be met by the charitable. The capitation grant of five shillings per week is not suf ficient to pay the expenses of the boys continually sent here by the police magistrates. It seems extraordinary that the Legislature should pass a most comprehensive Act for the rescue of the juvenile population from crime, but should have for gotten to provide the means for their adequate reception and maintenance. If it would only give a tenth part of the sum for the prevention of crime that it gives for its punishment, half the prisons in England would in a few years be vacant, and the ceremony of presenting the judges with white gloves would be a very common occurrence at our assizes. A. WYNTER A MORNING IN SPRING. O CALM sweet morn! Myriads of rosy buds Flush in thy dawning loveliness to-day; Among the lingering shades of wintry grey, They lend a crimson colour to the woods. He mingles cloud with sunshine, while with shower Then may this life obey the Life Divine, May every fruitful bough find freer scope, From every leafless twig spring buds of hope, In every passing cloud Faith's rainbow shine. ELFIS THE only crown that' Christ ever wore on earth was a crown of thorns; and in ancient prophecy He was spoken of as "a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief;" as if, in this world of pain, and disease, and disappointment, and death, none would ever know, before He came, the real heart of suffering or the last depths of woe. When He was here, the sick and the wretched gathered about Him; and ever since He left the world, his name has been on the lips of men far oftener in their trouble than in their joy. And as it is the sorrowful especially that come to Christ, sorrow is also a universal element of the Christian's life, sorrow for the sufferings of Christ, sorrow for our own sins which made those sufferings hecessary, sorrow for the sins of other men whose hearts the love of Christ has not yet touched to penitence or inspired with a passion for holiness. The Christian faith has revealed unexpected depths of pathos in the human soul; and in Christian literature there is so much of sadness, and Christian art, as it has been recently said, has so "deep a moaning in it," that in the judgment of Augustus Schlegel, while the poetry of the ancients is the poetry of enjoy. ment, that of the moderns is the expression of unsatisfied desire. Christianity has been called the religion of sorrow. But surely too much has been made of the more pathetic elements of the Christian faith and life. Instead of defining the religion of Christ as the religion of sorrow, I should prefer defining it as the religion of consolation. of affecting a rigorous and austere life, He was found at the tables of all sorts of men, so that his enemies called Him a glutton and a wine-bibber; and instead of discouraging the harmless festivities of life, He turned water into wine, that the rejoicings at the marriage of his friend might not be abruptly closed. "The ideal saint is not to be found in the New Testament ;-I mean the saint with the pale countenance, the wasted form, the hands clasped in continual prayer, the lips closed in continual silence, the rough garment, the austerities, the self-inflicted chastisements, which are necessary to the popular conception of the character. Peter was not a man of that kind, nor Paul, nor John. It is said that James the Just lived a severe life, and that he knelt so constantly, that his knees were like the knees of a camel; it may have been so, but tradi tion on such points is not very trustworthy; and, anyhow, no prophecy or epistle in the Old Testament or the New, exhibits such a representation of the ideal Christian life for us to honour and imitate. The writer to whom I referred just now, as admiring "holy melancholy," appeals to John the Baptist as an 'e: l'example of severe saintly virtues ; but it is enough to say that our Lord himself not only spoke emphatically of the very great contrast between his own manner of life and John's, but said, "the least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he, "... I have known some eminent saints-people that loved God with a great love, trusted Him with a perfect faith, kept his commandments, and lived and moved and had their being in the light of the Divine presence but they have not been at all of the sort that artists delight to paint and poets to celebrate. They were not melancholy, ghastly, sorrow-stricken persons at all. They were brave and hopeful; they enjoyed heartily the pleasant things of life, and made light of its sorrows. Some of them had humour and wit, an eye that twinkled merrily, and a laugh that rang like a peal of bells. In health and strength, they were the kind of people that take sun-light with them wherever they go; and in sickness they preserved an in domitable cheerfulness. I do not say that all very good people are always happy; but my impression is, that the very best people I have ever known, the people who have had least sin and selfishness in them, and most of the Spirit of God, instead of being characterised by a "holy melancholy" had "a merry heart," which Solomon says, "doeth good like a medicine.” It is quite true that Christendom has encouraged what a Catholic writer calls a holy melancholy." For myself, I find nothing holy in it, and the means which have encouraged it appear to me flagrantly unchristian. What right have we, for instance, to make a crucifix the centre of Christian worship? Could the angels of the sepulchre revisit the world again, and appear in their own shining forms in the cathedrals and churches of continental Europe, they would point with gestures of amazement and sorrow at the images of Christ's last agony, around which the millions of the Catholic Church continually gather; they would repeat the words which they uttered eighteen centuries ago to the sorrowing women who had come in the early morning to render to the dead body of Christ the last offices of despairing love. They would exclaim again, "He is not here"-not in the sepulchre not on the cross-"He is risen." If the death of Christ, while still holding the supreme place in the memory of the Church, no longer concealed from us his present power and glory, much of the "holy The melancholy, wasted, saint is not the true melancholy" which has been mistaken for devout-Protestant ideal of saintliness. Luther himself ness, would disappear. There is a tradition that our Lord, though He often wept, never smiled. I should like to know on what that tradition rests. I know that instead would never have done his gigantic work, as la great popular reformer, but for his physical robustness; and his habits were as far as possible from asceticism. The Puritans were, no doubt, inclined |