MORNING.
EVENING.
CHILDREN OF THE PANTOMIME.
In the great city of London one of the pleasures and delights of the merry Christmas season, to which the children look forward with almost as much eagerness as to the advent of Santa Claus, is the pantomime.
What a fairy-land is revealed to youthful eyes by this holiday amusement! All the stories of Mother Goose become living realities. Jack and Jill roll down the hill; Tom, the piper's son, suffers no end of misfortunes as a punishment for his theft of the pig; Little Jack Horner eats his Christmas pie; and in company with all these nursery heroes are wonderful crowds of all-powerful fairies, who by a wave of their wands give birds and beasts human intelligence, and render pots, kettles, and pans animated. This gay assemblage appears in fairy grottoes glistening with brilliant colors, sylvan dells flooded with soft moonlight, and meadows on which fairies trace the magic ring and weave the figures of their mystic dance.
The other side of the picture is less radiant. All these fairies with spangled hair, these animated kettles and saucepans, these birds and beasts which dance and hop about in such mirthful fashion, are the little children of the poor, who in this way seek to earn a few shillings for the sick mother, or the starving baby brother or sister, in the dreary and desolate apartments which these poor families call home.
Weeks before Christmas the parents of these children, and often the children themselves, beg to be enrolled in the infantile army needed for the pantomime. The number of applications is so large that the first selection is made by height alone, no child over four feet being received for examination. The smaller the child, the better, so long as it is old enough to learn the duties required of it. The children thus selected are then placed in a line, and told to put forward their left feet and hold up their right hands.