Did I say that the charge for each child is twopence daily? Nominally it is so; and let those who desire to know something of the real annals of the poor remember that even this small sum--which of course cannot adequately represent anything like the cost--is not easily subtracted from the scanty earnings of poor women engaged in slopwork, or selling dried fish, plants, crockery, and small wares in the streets, or going out to work in warehouses, rope-walks, match-making, box-making, and other poor employments, where the daily wages will not reach to shillings, and sometimes are represented only in the pence column. Let it be remembered, too, that the husbands of these women (those who are not prematurely widows, or whose husbands have not deserted them) are employed as dock labourers, and are often under the terrible curse of drink, or are in prison, while the women struggle on to support the little ones, who but for this institution, would perhaps be left--hungry, naked, and sickly--to the care of children only two or three years older than themselves; or would be locked in wretched rooms without food or fire till the mother could toil homeward, with the temptation of a score of gin-shops in the way.
Each of the bright intelligent little faces now before us has its history, and a very suggestive and pathetic history too.
Look at this little creature, whose pet name of Fairy bespeaks the loving care which her destitute babyhood calls forth; she is only ten months old, and her mother is but nineteen, the widow of a sailor lost at sea two months before the baby was born.
Katie, of the adult age of five years, is the child of a man who works on barges. Rosie, one of the first inmates, has a drunken dock-labourer for a father, and her mother is dead. Dicky represents the children whose father, going out to sea in search of better fortune for wife and children, is no more heard of, and is supposed to be dead. "The King" is fatherless, and his mother works in a bottle-warehouse. The pathetic stories of these children is told by Mrs. Hilton herself, in the little simple reports of this most admirable charity. They are so touching, that I cannot hope to reproduce them in any language so likely to go straight to the heart as that in which you may read them for yourself if you will either visit the Crèche, or send ever so small a donation, and ask for a copy of the modest brown-covered little chronicle of these baby-lives. Standing here in the two nurseries, where the dolls and Noah's arks, the pictures and the doves, nay, even the baby-jumpers suspended from the ceilings, are but accessories to the clasp of loving arms and the softly-spoken words of tender womanly kindness, I wonder why all one side of Stepney Causeway has not been demanded by a discriminating public for the extension of such an institution. Loitering in the lower room, where one little bright face is lifted up to mine, as the tiny hands pluck at my coat-skirt, and another chubby fist is busy with my walking-stick, I begin to think of the workhouse ward, where mothers are separated from their children night and day; of a prison, where I have seen a troop of little boys, and a flogging-room provided by a beneficent Government for the recognition by the State of children who had qualified themselves for notice by the commission of what the law called crime.