“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
TO NURSE A MOTHERLESS ONE
beside her own or take charge of a run-about child. When the mother goes away she usually leaves the child and pays a weekly sum for its maintenance or makes it over to managers, who offer it for adoption.
A great many, most of the children who are taken to asylums of this sort, become candidates for adoption. The work of disposing the waifs in suitable homes is one of intense interest and anxious responsibility. The adoption committee is composed, therefore, of the most efficient managers in the board. Members of this committee come into contact with no end of queer people and have many strange experiences to relate. The whole business is the outcome of the criminal side of life these papers are discussing, and as such these incidents are not incongruous here.
There are so many people and so many different sorts of people desiring children for adoption that it requires a peculiarly shrewd faculty and a practical knowledge of human nature to discriminate between the worthy and the unworthy. The circumstances of all persons wishing to adopt children are fully investigated, and references as to their respectability must be presented and approved before a child is committed to their care. Persons moving into new neighborhoods often intend passing the child as their own. Strange orders are often received from a distance—“special commissions,” as manufacturers say. The child must have eyes of peculiar cerulean blueness, hair of a particular golden color, fingers tapering, nails pink-tinted, toes graduated to a nicety, and the limbs dimpled. There is not a doubt but that scores of happy new mothers could furnish just such a wonderful babe, but this order comes to the matron and managers of an infant asylum. A woman writes for a baby with brown, curly hair and large dark blue eyes, and a man—but how should he know any better?—telegraphs for a child with light curly hair, warranted to turn dark as the child grows older—the hair, mind you. During a year not more than three or four children with dark hair and eyes are called for, whereas people are anxious to get blonde girls, and many applications are made for children of that description. It looks as if it would take a strong revolution of popular feeling to restore brunettes to popular favor.
Certain it is, these good people would not be so fastidious if they got up their own babies. The greater number of people who take children from asylums are
CHILDLESS COUPLES
well on in life. A few children are adopted by widowers or widows. Some are taken by those kind-hearted, unselfish bodies who want something animate to love; others replace the loss of a dear little one by installing in its stead one of these little waifs. However, there are children enough for all whose hearts have mother love to lavish upon them.
Oftentimes the foundling asylum, in its general material capacity, is a very angel bringing peace and good will to discontented, childless couples, and sending happiness to distracted homes. An instance of its good work in this mission occurred in a city not a thousand miles from Toronto. Late one night a private carriage drove to the residence in a fashionable portion of the city, of one of the trustees of an asylum. A woman alighted, passed into the house, and secured an interview with the lady trustee. The visitor gave first-class references, and by all her outward manifestations was a person of wealth, and she looked as if she would require the services of Sairy Gamp in a few days.