to be bad. She knows how to get money, she
says, and she will get it as her mother did; and
then, by judicious management, the evil hour
passes, and she is penitent, self-reconciled, and
good. She is a fine-natured little creature,
loving, turbulent, impulsive, full of power; but
needing to be cared for during the tender years
of her life, or she will go to the bad altogether.

One was a little girl, taken at six—not sixteen
—from a life of vice; and she, too, often threatens
to go back to her old habits, and follow in
the steps of her mother. In that frightful
house where she lived among her mother's
companions, as part scholar part plaything, one
of the poor creatures taught her the Lord's
Prayer. It was not her own mother, but
another woman. Her father was an Oxford
pressman; her mother, we already know of
what class; and there was this little creature
foredoomed to destruction, had it not been for
the help of the Lady and the Leytonstone Home.
One little stray lamb was the daughter of a
woman who had been a good mother while she
lived, but who had died and left her to a worthless
father. She wore a nightgown for the first
time in her remembrance when she came to the
Home. A girl of eleven was a confirmed
drunkard. She had been brought up by a
Quakeress, but something had disgusted her
with religion, and she came to the Home a
thorough little infidel. She did not come a
very long way, but she had beer six times
during her journey. Her mother was a real
fiend by all accounts, and the girl has inherited
some of her passionate propensities. But she
too has a conscience which care and education
can develop; and she too gives great promise of
future good, if only she can be kept in the right
way during her first youth. She is not allowed
to touch beer now, for even yet the love of
drink still lingers in her, and it would not be
safe to trust her with either a beer can or a
spirit bottle. This, too, is another life saved.

The story of one of the sick girls—who may
be dead now, for she looked as if she had only
a few days to live when I saw her in July
—was about one of the saddest tragedies I
think I ever heard of. She was servant in a
boys' school, where she was weak enough to
allow herself to be led astray by one of the
boys, when, shame and remorse pressing on her
too sorely, she went mad, and was sent to St.
Luke's. In time she was cured and discharged,
but then she was in consumption—when I saw
her, in the last stage. I do not think I ever
saw such eyes. Brighter than the brightest,
large, dark, hollow, they fascinated me as they
looked at me with a wild, shy, hunted look—
that peculiar look of latent madness added to
the pathetic brilliancy of consumption. Her
face was a dead waxen white, thin and ghastly—
only those unearthly eyes to give it life. For a
long time this poor creature would not come
into the prayers daily said in the little room
that serves as the chapel of the Home. Once
she had been refused the Sacrament, and this
had struck her. No, she said, if she was not
good enough for the one, she was not good
enough for the other; so she obstinately refused
to join, and the Lady judiciously left her free
to do as she liked. But the invalid's room is
next to the chapel, where, lying on their beds,
and with the door of communication open, the
poor sick things may hear the prayers as well
as if personally before the altar. So, gradually
the dying girl came first to the invalid's
room, and then one day said suddenly she
would go in to prayers. The Lady went
down into the common room where the children
were, and told them all they were to be very
careful, and not look towards the place where
Kate would be. They were to take no notice of
her, but they were to be good and quiet and
natural. So they all came in, and, turning
away their heads from Kate, stared at the Lady
so persistently during the whole time of prayers,
that she scarcely knew what to do under the
fire of all those young round eyes. Since then
poor Kate glides in, in her silent ghostly way,
unnoticed and as one of the others; and she
was to have the Sacrament administered—which
is so much gained for the poor passing soul.

I was much pleased by the extreme simplicity
and homeliness of the whole establishment.
There is nothing here of the stately severity of
Clewer, nothing of the uniformity of the regular
Orphanages and Homes which have their own
buildings and their own organisation. This
Home is, as I have said, a mere cottage with
a sloping roof, where the laundry is what was
of old the stable; where space is so valuable that
one bed is placed on a kind of shelf half way up
the stairs; where scarcely two beds have the
same kind of counterpane; where the beds
themselves are made of chaff, shredded paper,
and the like. The washstands are of the most
primitive description, and the crockery is
cracked and broken; but in each third room or
so is a large basinful of disinfecting fluid, and
the whole place, well scoured and ventilated, is
as sweet as a lord's mansion. The dress of the
children, too, is just of the same kind, evidently
made up of scraps and chance gifts, and all of
the same quality and fashion usually worn by
poor children. There is no uniform, and no
attempt at picturesqueness. Cleanliness and
patches, wholesomeness and darns—here a
battered old hat, there a tumbled old bonnet; one
child in a jacket, another in a cape, a third in a
"crossover;" whatever would do for clothing
of a decent kind pressed into the service, and
the result, to my mind, more satisfactory than
if there were a larger display of the pomp of
charity, and more of the perfect organisation
visible in the grander, wealthier, more systematic
Homes. Here, then, is a work going on of which
very few know even the necessity, and which
fewer still would venture to undertake. What
help and what honour ought we not to show to
those who attempt this reclamation of the
wandering young?—to those who seek to make
profit out of such apparently utterly hopeless
material, and to create human beings fit for
good work in the place of castaways and