This is gallantry and this is appreciation of art. Five minutes later, after seeing the champion of Byles's Rents again victorious in the sack race, we descend to the painting room to find Miss Millie White (ætat eight), the celebrated animal painter, daughter of Larry White; the well-known Shoreditch navvy, surrounded by her admirers. In another part of the same room we come upon quite an animated group of talented colourists. Some of the designs done by these children of the slums are most creditable, and at least their faces are radiant with happiness, which is the chief thing after all. The articles produced in the toy-making room are vastly ingenious. Out of the most unpromising materials--such as reels of cotton and match-boxes, fortified by cardboard and coloured paper--the most delectable toys are produced.
[Illustration: ARTIFICIAL FLOWERS MADE BY THE CHILDREN.
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.
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."