Tremble and blacken;—the blue eye o' the pool
Is closed and clouded; with a shrill sharp cry,
Oiling its wings, a swallow darteth past,
And weedling flowers beneath my feet thrust up
Their leaves to feel the coming shower. O hark!
The thirsty leaves are troubled into sighs,
And up above me, on the glistening boughs,
Patters the summer rain!
                                            Into a nook,
Screen'd by thick foliage of oak and beech,
I creep for shelter; and the summer shower
Murmurs around me. In a dream I watch
And listen. O the sweetness of the sounds,
The pattering rain, the murmurous sigh of leaves,
The deep warm breathing of the scented air,
They sink into my soul—until at last
Comes the soft ceasing of the gentle fall,
And lo! the eye of blue within the pool
Opens again, while in a silvern gleam
The jewels twinkle moistly on the leaves,
Or, shaken downward by the summer wind,
Fall melting on the pool in rings of light!

LITTLE PAUPER BOARDERS.

ONE of the most important and pressing
of all the important and pressing problems
connected with the workhouse system,
concerns the rearing and education of pauper
children; of those pauper children, that is
to say, who by reason of the death or
disappearance of their parents are thrown
entirely upon the hands of the parish, or,
in other words, are dependent solely upon
the State. According to the practice
generally adopted at the present time, these
unfortunates receive the whole of their
education within the walls of the
workhouse. However well conducted the
workhouse, however much pains and care be
taken with the children, the results are not
satisfactory. The monotonous, semi-prison
life of the "House" is a most unsuitable
atmosphere for the growth of a child's
intelligence; the sordid, hopeless pauperism
of its surroundings must degrade and
depress the child's mind. Hence it is not
surprising to find that when a child who
has from birth, or from earliest youth, been
reared and educated in the workhouse, is
sent forth to make its first start in life, it
is found to be but seldom fitted for the
struggle. School education it may have
had, and may carry away with it a fair
amount of book-knowledge; but of that
other knowledge of the world and of human
life, which is only to be got by freedom of
thought and actual contact with the world
itself, it possesses no jot. What little
contact with the outer world it may,
unfortunately for itself and for society, have had,
is of the worst kind. It is almost impossible
to over-estimate the amount of damage
that may be, and is, done, to these permanent
pauper children, by the casual children
who, with their parents, pass through
the workhouse from time to time, and
whose workhouse lives are interludes in
lives of vagrancy and crime. So, either
the workhouse-bred child on its entrance
into active life is unable, in its helpless
awkwardness, to avail itself of the little it
actually does know, or it is already ripe for
evil-doing. In either case it is naturally
looked at with some dislike in the labour
market. So, too often, many such children
are gradually drafted, willing recruits, into
the great army of crime, or are content to
drift back to the workhouse and a life of
lazy, shiftless pauperism.

The plan of removing the children
altogether from the workhouse, and of
establishing district schools, has been tried in
many parishes. Although this system is
an improvement on the other, the results
are far from satisfactory. The tide of
casual children flows through the district,
as through the workhouse school, and
contamination surely follows. The children
from the district schools are better able to
hold their own in the world than those
brought up exclusively in the workhouse;
but it is doubtful whether, in the long run,
they turn out any better. For instance:
seven years ago, chance brought to light
the existence of an amount of evil in the
Eton workhouse school, that necessitated
its being forthwith broken up. The
guardians sent their pauper children to the
district school at Hanwell. Two years
sufficed to put the guardians out of conceit
with this system, and the children were
removed. We may suppose they had good
reasons for this step. They most certainly
ought to have known what a bad school
was, as, in the investigation into the condition
of their own workhouse school, it had
been discovered that between January,
1858, and December, 1861, forty per cent
of the children had turned out ill. An
officer of the separate schools for the
Manchester and Liverpool Unions, is reported
to have said, in answer to a question as to
what proportion of girls sent from that
establishment had gone wrong: "Do not
ask me: it is so painful that I can hardly
tell you the extent to which evil will
predominate in those proceeding from our
institution." Similarly, we read of the report
of the Kirkdale separate school being:
"The number of girls who came to grief,
who went out from that institution, was
painful to think of, it was so large." And
these are by no means isolated cases.
Leaving out of sight for a moment the