As the famous chef, Brillat-Savarin, could create an exquisite soup out of a kid glove and a pint of boiling water, so these tiny artisans manage to manufacture butchers' shops, chests of drawers, tables, sofas, Christmas crackers, and luxuriant flowers out of the meanest ingredients. One of the favourite diversions of the smaller children is cutting out and colouring fashion-plates, decapitating the heads and fitting on instead portraits of their favourite "great ladies" of the Happy Evenings Association which they have found in the newspapers. These are afterwards stiffened with cardboard and made to stand up in a group, which at a distance gives a very good idea of a swell reception amongst the "hupper suckles"—if it did not more nearly suggest a wax-work gathering at Madame Tussaud's. Two of these figures we photographed for The Strand—Lady Northcote and Lady Margaret Rice—both indefatigable workers of the Children's Happy Evenings Association.
LADY NORTHCOTE.
As constructed by the children.
And what—the reader may ask at this stage—what is the Happy Evenings Association? Well, it is a body of kind-hearted ladies and gentlemen—numbering some of the highest and noblest names that you will find in "Burke" or "Debrett"—who take a pleasure in going down amongst the slums of London and teaching the slum waifs how to play. For the London guttersnipe doesn't know how to play. As a rule, he or she can maunder about and fight and scream and exchange badinage and throw stones in the gutter, but of true games the gamin is as ignorant as his parents are of entrées or Euclid. Before the association was started in 1891 there was no one to teach them the mysteries of battledore and shuttlecock, sack races, kiss-in-the-ring, picture-books, dolls, and doll dressmaking. As their motto expressed it, the association, whose first efforts began at the Waterloo Road Schools, was "to put a thought beneath their rags to ennoble the heart's struggle."
LADY MARGARET RICE.
As constructed by the children.
