'No, sir, only four; these two little ones ain't mine—they are staying with us.'
I imagined that they were the children of a relative, and questioned the woman further, wondering how she cared to crowd her little den with extra visitors, and then the story came out.
These two extra mouths the good soul was feeding belonged to two little children whose mother, a widow, lived in a room above. For an assault upon the police she had been sent to prison. Thus the position of these orphans with a living parent was terrible. They would have been starved or taken to the workhouse, but this good creature went up and fetched them down to be with her own children, and made them welcome; she washed them and dressed them, and did for them all she could, and she intended to keep them if she was able till the mother came out.
She didn't see that she had done anything wonderful. 'It was only neighbourly-like, and my heart bled to see the poor young 'uns a-cryin', and that wretched and neglected and dirty.'
Such cases as this are common enough—the true charity, the charity which robs itself to give to others, is nowhere so common as among the poor. The widow's mite that won the Saviour's praise is cast into the great treasury daily, and surely stands now, as then, far higher on the roll of good deeds than all the gold flung carelessly by the hands of the rich to every box-rattler who promises 'that the amount shall be duly acknowledged in the Times.'
I will quote one more case, which has just come under my personal observation, and which illustrates the brave struggles against adversity of which these people are capable.
Our attention was directed to the circumstance by the head-mistress of the school which the children were attending, and who had noticed that they, who had always been the cleanest and tidiest in the class, were beginning to show signs of a little less motherly care. The children said their mother was too ill to do much, and we went to see her.
Mrs. B. had some children of her own, and in addition she and her husband had taken in a little girl whose father had gone off tramping in search of work.
We found her propped up in a chair looking terribly ill, but in front of her, in another chair, was the wash-tub, and the poor woman was making a feeble effort to wash and wring out some of the children's things. She was dying. She was suffering from dropsy, and had not lain down for a month—the water was rising rapidly, and would soon reach her heart and kill her. Yet here she sat, scarcely able to breathe, and enduring untold agony, but making an effort to the very last to work and keep her little ones clean and tidy.
It is a glorious lot in life, these people's—is it not?—to toil on and struggle, to resist temptation, and giving their youth and age to the hardest labour for a wage that barely staves off starvation, to know that when illness comes, or time steals their strength away, they are mere burthens, refuse to be got rid of, since it encumbers the land.