April 1
Last minute of Sunday, so here's to you. To-morrow I shall be cheerfully immersed up to the eyes in work.
Oh! this Home. How little it deserves the name! Our English storms are nothing but babies compared with the appalling blasts which sweep down upon us from the north. In summer the furious seas dash against the cliffs as if to protect them from the desecration of human encroachment. The fine snow filters in between the roof and ceiling of this building, and in a "mild," such as we are now experiencing, it melts, and endless little rivulets trickle down in nearly every room. The water comes in on my bed, on the kitchen range, and on the dining-room table. It falls on the sewing-machine in one room, on the piano and bookcase in another. Its catholicity of taste is plain disheartening!
You ask whether these kiddies have the stuff in them to repay what you are pleased to term "such an outlay of effort." My emphatic "yes" should have been so insistent as to have reached you by telepathy when the doubt first presented itself. The Home has been established now long enough to have some of its "graduates" go out into life; and the splendid manhood and womanhood of these young people are at once a sufficient reward to us and a silencing response to you. Many of them have been sent to the States and Canada for further education, and are now not only writing a successful story for themselves, but helping their less fortunate neighbours, in a way we from outside never can, to turn over many a new leaf in their books.
Yesterday I attended the theatre, only it was the operating theatre. The patient on this occasion was a doll, the surgeon a lad of seven, himself a victim of infantile paralysis, and the head nurse assisting was aged nine, and wears a brace on each leg. The stage was the children's ward of the hospital. Here are several pathetic little people, orthopedic cases, brought in for treatment during the winter, and who must stay till the spring boat arrives, as their homes are now cut off by interminable miles of snow wastes and icy sea. Nothing escapes their notice. They tear up their Christmas picture books, and when charged with the enormity of their offence, explain that they "must have adhesive tape for their operative work." Dick, the surgeon, was overheard the other day telling Margaret, the head nurse, as together they amputated the legs of her doll, "This is the way Sir Robert Jones does it."
Next to operating, the children love music; and they love it with a repertoire varied to meet every mood, from "Keep the Home Fires Burning" to "In the Courts of Belshazzar and a Hundred of his Lords." One three-year-old scrap comes from a Salvation Army household, and listens to all such melodies with marked disapproval. But when the others finish, she "pipes up," shutting her eyes, clapping her hands and swaying back and forth—
"Baby's left the cradle for the Golden Shore:
Now he floats, now he floats,
Happy as before."
Three of the kiddies are Roman Catholics and have taught their companions to say their prayers properly of an evening. They all cross themselves devoutly at the close; but this instruction has fallen on fallow ground in the wee three-year-old. She sits with eyes tightly screwed together lest she be forced even to witness such heresy and schism.
Yesterday I was walking with Gabriel when we came upon a tiny bird essaying his first spring song on a tree-top nearby. Gabriel looked at the newcomer silently for several minutes, and finally, turning his luminous brown eyes up to my face, asked, "Do he sing hymns, Teacher?"
April 19