One of the little patients followed our movements with its eyes, with a sad, thoughtful, peaceful look; one indulged in a big stare of childish curiosity and wonder. They had toys strewn upon their counterpanes. A sick child is a contradiction of ideas, like a cold summer. But to quench the summer in a child's heart is, thank God! not easy. If we do not make a frost with wintry discipline, if we will use soft looks and gentle words; though such an hospital be full of sick and ailing bodies, the light, loving spirits of the children will fill its wards with pleasant sounds, contrasting happily with the complainings that abound among our sick adults. Suffer these little ones to come to such a Christian House, and forbid them not! They will not easily forget it. Around the gates of the Child's Hospital at Frankfort, hangs a crowd of children who have been discharged, lying in wait to pounce with a loving word upon any of those who tended them when sick. They send little petitions in to the hospital authorities to be allowed, as a special favor, to come into the garden again, to play. A child's heart is soon touched by gentle people; and a Child's Hospital in London, through which there should pass yearly eight hundred children of the poor, would help to diffuse a kind of health that is not usually got out of apothecaries' bottles.
We have spoken only of five children; the sixth was not in bed and not at rest. He was a literary character, studiously combining into patterns letters of the alphabet; but he had removed his work so far out of the little world to which he belonged, that he attracted no attention from his neighbors. There are larger children in a greater world who do the like. The solitary child was lonely—not from want of love—its thoughts were at home wandering about its mother; it had not yet learned to reconcile itself to temporary separation. We seemed to leave the shadows of our day-dream in attendance on it, and to take up our young surgeon again.
Having paid as we were able brief respects to each member of the little company, and having seen the bath-rooms on this floor, we continued our progress upward. Of course there were no more stately drawing-rooms, but all the rooms were spacious, and, by modern care, had been, moreover, plentifully furnished with the means of ventilation. There were bath-rooms, of course; there were wards cut off from the rest for fever cases. Good thought had been evidently directed to a good purpose every where.
Having seen all these things, we came downstairs again, and passing trough the surgery—upon whose jars and bottles our eyes detected many names of compounds palatable to little mouths—we were shown through an excellent consulting-room, into a wide hall, with another of the massive chimney-pieces. This hall is entered from a side street, and is intended for a waiting-room for out-patients. It had always belonged to the brave house in Great-Ormond-street, and had been used at one time for assemblies.
What we have said of the few patients admitted at the early period of our visit, will have shown the spirit in which a Child's Hospital should be conducted. Of course, to such an institution a garden and play-ground for the convalescent is an essential requisite. We inquired, therefore, for the garden in Great Ormond-street. We were shown out through a large door under a lattice, and found a terrace in the old style, descending by steps to a considerable space of ground. The steps were short, suited to little feet; so also in the house, according to the old style, which curiously fits itself to the modern purpose. We found that an air of neatness had been given to that portion of the ground immediately near the house; but the space generally is very ample, and is at present a mere wilderness. The funds of the hospital have only sufficed to authorize the occupation of a building, and the preparation for a great useful work. For means to plant the roses in the garden, and to plant the roses in the cheeks of many children besides those who come under their immediate care, the Hospital Committee has support to find.
So large a piece of garden-ground waiting for flowers, only a quarter of a mile from Holborn, was a curious thing to contemplate. When we looked into the dead house, built for the reception of those children whom skill and care shall fail to save, and heard of the alarm which its erection had excited in the breasts of some "particular" old ladies in the neighborhood, we felt inclined to preach some comfort to them. Be of good heart, particular old ladies! In every street, square, crescent, alley, lane, in this great city, you will find dead children too easily. They lie thick all around you. This little tenement will not hurt you; there will be the fewer dead-houses for it; and the place to which it is attached may bring a saving health upon Queen-square, a blessing on Great Ormond-street!
[THE LAST REVEL.]
A TALE OF THE COAST-GUARD.
When I was quite a lad, a servant lived with us of the name of Anne Stacey. She had been in the service of William Cobbett, the political writer, who resided for some years at Botley, a village a few miles distant from Itchen. Anne might be about two or three and twenty years of age when she came to us; and a very notable, industrious servant she was, and remarked, moreover, as possessing a strong religious bias. Her features, every body agreed, were comely and intelligent. But that advantage in the matrimonial market was more than neutralized by her unfortunate figure, which, owing, as we understood, to a fall in her childhood, was hopelessly deformed, though still strongly set and muscular. Albeit a sum of money—about fifty pounds—scraped together by thrifty self-denial during a dozen years of servitude, amply compensated in the eyes of several idle and needy young fellows for the unlovely outline of her person; and Anne, with an infatuation too common with persons of her class and condition, and in spite of repeated warning, and the secret misgivings, one would suppose, of her own mind, married the best-looking, but most worthless and dissipated of them all. This man, Henry Ransome by name, was, I have been informed, constantly intoxicated during the first three months of wedlock, and then the ill-assorted couple disappeared from the neighborhood of Itchen, and took up their abode in one of the hamlets of the New Forest. Many years afterward, when I joined the Preventive Service, I frequently heard mention of his name as that of a man singularly skillful in defrauding the revenue, as well as in avoiding the penalties which surround that dangerous vocation. One day, he was pointed out to me when standing by the Cross-House near the Ferry, in company with a comparatively youthful desperado, whose real name was John Wyatt, though generally known among the smuggling fraternity and other personal intimates, by the sobriquet of Black Jack—on account, I suppose, of his dark, heavy-browed, scowling figure-head, one of the most repulsive, I think, I have ever seen. Anne's husband, Henry Ransome, seemed, so far as very brief observation enabled me to judge, quite a different person from his much younger, as well as much bigger and brawnier associate. I did not doubt that, before excessive indulgence had wasted his now pallid features, and sapped the vigor of his thin and shaking frame, he had been a smart, good-looking chap enough; and there was, it struck me, spite of his reputation as "a knowing one," considerably more of the dupe than the knave, of the fool than the villain, in the dreary, downcast, skulking expression that flitted over his features as his eye caught mine intently regarding him. I noticed also that he had a dry, hard cough, and I set down in my own mind as certain that he would, ere many months passed away, be consigned, like scores of his fellows, to a brandy-hastened grave. He indicated my presence—proximity, rather—to Wyatt, by a nudge on the elbow, whereupon that respectable personage swung sharply round, and returned my scrutinizing gaze by one of insolent defiance and bravado, which he contrived to render still more emphatic by thrusting his tongue into his cheek. This done, he gathered up a coil of rope from one of the seats of the Cross-House, and said: "Come, Harry, let's be off. That gentleman seems to want to take our pictures—on account that our mugs are such handsome ones, no doubt; and if it was a mildish afternoon, I shouldn't mind having mine done; but as the weather's rather nippy like, we'd better be toddling, I think." They then swaggered off, and crossed the Ferry.