Purify my heart, devote me all to duty,
Sanctify me wholly for Thy realms above.
Holy, heavenly Parent of this earthborn spirit,
Onward and upward bear it to its home,
With Thy Firstborn Son eternal joys to inherit,
Where my blessed Father beckons me to come.—
December 25th, 1858.
M. C.
The teaching work in the Red Lodge and the Ragged Schools, which I continued for a long time after leaving Miss Carpenter’s house, was not, I have thought on calm reflection in after years, very well done by me. I have always lacked imagination enough to realize what are the mental limitations of children of the poorer classes; and in my eagerness to interest them and convey my thoughts, I know I often spoke over their heads, with too rapid utterance and using too many words not included in their small vocabularies. I think my lessons amused and even sometimes delighted them; I was always told they loved them; but they enjoyed them rather I fear like fireworks than instruction! In the Red Lodge there were fifty poor little girls from 10 to 15 years of age who constituted our prisoners. They were regularly committed to the Lodge as to jail, and when Miss Carpenter was absent I had to keep the great door key. They used to sit on their benches in rows opposite to me in the beautiful black oak-panelled room of the Lodge, and read their dreary books, and rejoice (I have no doubt) when I broke in with explanations and illustrations. Their poor faces, often scarred by disease, and ill-shaped heads, were then lifted up with cheerful looks to me, and I ploughed away as best I could, trying to get any ideas into their minds; in accordance with Mary Carpenter’s often repeated assurance that anything whatever which could pass from my thoughts to theirs would be a benefit, as supplying other pabulum than their past familiarity with all things evil. When we had got through one school reading book in this way I begged Miss Carpenter to find me another to afford a few fresh themes for observations, but no; she preferred that I should go over the same again. Some of the children had singular histories. There was one little creature named Kitty, towards whom I confess my heart warmed especially, for her leonine disposition! Whenever there was some mischief discovered and the question asked Who was in fault? invariably Kitty’s hand went up: “I did it, ma’am;” and the penalty, even of incarceration in a certain dreaded “cell,” was heroically endured. Kitty had been duly convicted at Sessions at the mature age of ten. Of what high crime and misdemeanour does the reader suppose? Pilfering, perhaps, a pocket handkerchief, or a penny? Not at all! Of nothing less than Horse-stealing! She and her brother, a mite two years younger than herself, were dispatched by their vagabond parents to journey by one road, while they themselves travelled by another, and on the way the children, who were, of course, directed to pick and steal all they could lay hands on, observed an old grey mare feeding in a field near the road and reflecting that a ride on horseback would be preferable to their pilgrimage on foot, they scrambled on the mare’s back and by some means guided her down the road and went off in triumph. The aggrieved farmer to whom the mare belonged, brought the delinquents to justice, and after being tried with all the solemn forms of British law (their heads scarcely visible over the dock), the children were sent respectively to a Boy’s Reformatory, and to Red Lodge. We kept Kitty, of course, till her full term expired when she was 15, and I am afraid Miss Carpenter strained the law a little in detaining her still longer to allow her to gain more discretion before returning to those dreadful tramps, her parents. She herself, indeed, felt the danger as she grew older, and attached herself much to us both. A teacher whom I had imported from Ireland (one of my own village pupils from Donabate) told me that Kitty spoke of us with tears, and that she had seen her one day, when given a stocking of mine whereupon to practise darning, furtively kissing it when she thought no one was observing her. She once said, “God bless Exeter jail! I should never have been here but for that.” But at last, like George Eliot’s Gipsy, the claims of race over-mastered all her other feelings. Kitty left us to rejoin her mother, who had perpetually called to see her; and a month or two later the poor child died of fever, caught in the wretched haunts of her family.
