As we sit here and sip our tea—for I am invited to tea with the committee—and are waited on by three neat and pretty modest little women—one of them, a girl of eight, so full of child-like grace and simplicity, that there would be some danger of her being spoiled if she were not quite used to a little petting—who can help looking at the inmates now assembling quite quietly at the other end of the room, and thinking that in some of those faces "their angels," long invisible because of neglect and wrong, are once more looking through, calm, happy, and with a hope that maketh not ashamed. Do you see that still rather sullen-looking girl of thirteen. She came here an incorrigible young thief—her father, a tanner's labourer, and out at work from five in the morning—her mother bedridden—her home was the streets—her companions a gang of juvenile thieves such as haunt Bermondsey, and make an offshoot of the population of a place till recently called "Little Hell."
That girl, aged ten, was sent out to beg and to sing songs, and was an adept in the art of pretending to have lost money. There is the daughter of a crossing-sweeper, who cut his throat, and yonder a child of nine, driven from home, and charged with stealing, as her sister also is, in another Refuge; and close by are two girls, also sisters, who were found fatherless and destitute, wandering about famishing and homeless, except for a wretched room, with nothing in it but two heaps of foul straw. I need not multiply cases: and but for the known power of love and true human interest, in which the very Divine love is incarnated, you would wonder where some of these children obtained their quiet docile manner, their fearless but modest demeanour, their bright, quiet, sweet faces.
One case only let me mention, and we will go quietly away, to think of what may be done in such a place by the discipline of this love and true Christian interest. Do you see that emaciated little creature—the pale, pinched shadow of a child sitting at a table, where some of her companions tend her very gently? She is the daughter of a woman who is an incorrigible beggar. She has never known a home, and for four out of her eight years of life has been dragged about the street an infant mendicant; has slept in common lodging-houses; and in her awful experience could have told of thieves' kitchens, of low taverns, and of the customs of those vile haunts where she had learnt the language of obscenity and depravity. But that has become a hideous, almost forgotten dream, and she is about to awaken to a reality in a world to which the present tenderness with which she is cared for is but the lowest threshold. It is only a question of a month or two perhaps. One more bright sunny holiday with her schoolmates in the pleasant garden of the treasurer, at Highgate—whither they all go for a whole happy day in the summer—and she will be in the very land of light before the next haytime comes round. She wants for nothing—wine and fruit and delicate fare are sent for her by kind sympathetic hands; but she is wearing away, not with pain, but with the exhaustion of vital power, through the privations of the streets. From the Refuge she will go home—a lost lamb found, and carried to the eternal fold.
But another building has been found; a large, old-fashioned mansion in St. Andrew's Road, close to the Canal Bridge at Cambridge Heath, and there the more advanced inmates of this original home in Spitalfields are to be drafted into classes whence they will go to take a worthy part in the work of the world, so soon as the necessary subscriptions enable the committee to increase the number of lambs rescued from the wolves of famine and of crime.
WITH THE SICK.
The memory of the pleasant summer holiday remains with many of us when we have come back again to the duties of the work-a-day world, and it will be good for us all if the gentle thoughts which that time of enjoyment brought with it remain in our hearts, to brighten our daily lives by the influences that suggest a merciful and forbearing temper.
It is perhaps remarkable that few of the charitable institutions at places to which holiday-makers resort are to any commensurate extent benefited by the contributions of those visitors who, while they are engaged in pursuing their own pleasures, seldom give themselves time to think that as they have freely received so they should freely give. Considering that while we are engaged in the absorbing business of money-making, or in the exacting engagements of our daily calling, we can afford little time for the investigation of those claims which are made upon us to help the poor and the needy, it might not altogether detract from the higher enjoyment of a period of leisure if we devoted a few spare hours to inquiring what is being effected for the relief of suffering in any place wherein we take up our temporary abode.
With some such reflection as this I stand to-day on the spot which to ordinary Londoners is most thoroughly representative of the summer "outing," without which no true Cockney can feel that he is content—a spot, too, which has become, for a large number of English men and women, and notably for a whole host of English children, the synonym for renewed health and strength—the head of Margate jetty.