THE WARM ROSE HUE OF SLEEP,
delicate eyelids cover great blue eyes, and the golden lashes lie like silken fringes on the soft face. Hair long and curling, the color of a buttercup is tossed from a fine high forehead, and a shapely tiny hand and rounded arm is thrust from under the cotton coverlet. He is strangely out of keeping with his surroundings, this lovely cherub boy, for he would grace the finest linen and silken hangings of a princely couch. Happier still he should have formed the golden nucleus of a home about which all the sweet domestic virtues might have bloomed.
Other little ones look curiously up with half closed eyes and drop to sleep again, but a wide-awake small boy lifts his dull eyes towards the matron and stretches out his weary arms for sympathy. In response the matron bestows upon him a wooden caress that is wholly unsatisfactory to the child. Soon the tired eyelids will have closed over all the tired eyes, and save for an occasional small cry the dormitory is quiet for the night, and the nurse in charge sleeps without serious interruption.
At midnight, sometimes, there is a ringing of the door-bell, a loud peremptory clangor. The matron goes down, draws the bolts, opens, and finds a policeman with a small parcel in his arms, or a basket in his hand.
“Oive brought yez an addition to the family, mum,” says the man of the baton, and he recites the street and number where the infant was found. The child is perhaps a few days old, has the scantiest of clothing, indeed its entire wardrobe may consist of a strip of an old woolen shawl wrapped around and around it, and it is pretty sure to be drugged into a stupidity from which it takes some days to recover, and many of them die of the narcotics. And thus this silent, despairing, dumb under-current manifests its existence to the world. The mothers of the children that fill foundling and orphan asylums are from the most ignorant classes. They are not of the women of the town, compared with whom they are relatively innocent. Many of them are farm servants, and numbers of them are immigrants unable to speak the English language. Of the mothers of the foundlings nothing is positively known; every suspicion is founded on conjecture. If the child is ever taken by its parents it is by adoption.
The mothers who present themselves with a child in arms, and just from the hospital, have to pass a board of inspectors for admission to the home. They are required to remain in the institution six months, and each