At the hall-door there was a porter, so new to his new work that the name of a surgeon to the institution was a strange sound in his ears. Crossing a spacious hall, we were ushered into a fine old ancestral parlor, which is now the board-room of the institution; and there, before a massive antique chimney-piece, we found a young house-surgeon.
Many stiff bows and formal introductions had those old walls seen, when Great Ormond-street was grand, and when frills and farthingales lent state to the great mansion. Many a minuet had been solemnly danced there; many hearts and fans had fluttered, many buckram flirtations had had their little hour; many births, marriages, and deaths had passed away, in due and undue course, out of the great hall-door into the family vaults--as old-fashioned now as the family mansion. Many little faces, radiant in the wintry blaze, had looked up in the twilight, wondering at the great old monument of a chimney-piece, and at the winking shadows peeping down from its recesses. Many, far too many pretty house-fairies had vanished from before it, and left blank spaces on the hearth, to be filled up nevermore.
O! baby's dead, and will be never, never, never seen among us any more! We fell into a waking dream, and the Spring air seemed to breathe the words. The young house-surgeon melted out of the quaint, quiet room; in his place, a group of little children gathered about a weeping lady; and the lamentation was familiar to the ancient echoes of the house. Then, there appeared to us a host of little figures, and cried, "We are baby. We were baby here, each of us in its generation, and were welcomed with joy, and hope, and thankfulness; but no love, and no hope, though they were very strong, could keep us, and we went our early way!"--"And we," said another throng of shades, "were that little child who lived to walk and talk, and to be the favorite, and to influence the whole of this great house, and make it very pleasant, until the infection that could not be stopped, was brought here from those poor houses not far off, and struck us one day while we were at play, and quenched the light of our bright eyes, and changed our prattle into moaning, and killed us in our promise!"--"And I," said another shadow, "am that girl who, having been a sick child once, grew to be a woman, and to love and to be blessed with love, and then--oh, at that hardest time! began to fade, and glided from the arms of my young husband, never to be mine on earth!"--"And I," said another shadow, "am the lame mis-shapen boy who read so much by this fireside, and suffered so much pain so patiently, and might have been as active and as straight as you, if any one had understood my malady; but I said to my fond father, carrying me in his arms to the bed from which I never rose: 'I think, oh dear papa, that it is better I should never be a man, for who could then carry me like this, or who could be so careful of me when you were gone!'" Then all the shadows said together: "We belonged to this house, but others like us have belonged to every house, and many such will come here now to be relieved, and we will put it in the hearts of mothers and fathers to remember them. Come up, and see!"