Page:All the Year Round - Series 2 - Volume 1.djvu/214

 heated brain, I can't help it. I have told the truth to the best of my belief, and if they object to receive it the fault is theirs: not mine.

often come to my window,
 * And knock at my chamber door,

Or sit by my side at dinner,
 * Or walk with me on the shore.

I know their villanous faces,
 * As they giggle, and sneer, and jar:

They will not be gone, so I'll count them,
 * And tell them what they are!

Ghosts of ambitions buried,
 * Ghosts of a love grown cold,

Ghosts of a fortune squandered,
 * Ghosts of a tale that's told,

Ghosts of a traitorous friendship,
 * And of follies nine times nine!

Come Wizard! come! and lay them
 * In the deep Red Sea!—of Wine!

" College Hospital, Portugal-street, Lincoln's-inn-fields. The committee of this institution desire to thank the many friends who have so kindly assisted them with presents of flowers and evergreens for the Christmas decorations of their hospital, and for furnishing the Christmas Tree for the children in the Pantia Ralli ward. The tree will be lighted this evening at about four o'clock. There are no infectious cases in the ward, and visitors desirous of seeing the decorations on the tree will be admitted at any time by giving their name to the porter at the door. A large portion of the decorations have been executed by the patients themselves, and have been carried out with so much taste as to be well worth a visit. F. A. Bedwell, vice-chairman."

This was the invitation to the public which appeared in the papers on New Year's morning, and which I, as one of the public, resolved to accept.

The first thing, of course, that struck the eye on entering the Pantia Ralli ward was the large, gaily decorated tree in the centre of the long, clean, airy room; then the holly wreaths, the floral emblems, the pretty pictures, and bright illuminated texts covering the walls. The first thing that struck the heart was the quiet happiness and homelike look of the groups clustered about the beds. Each little knot made a family party of its own, and brought the home into the hospital. Mothers and fathers, perhaps with one or two elder children, perhaps with a baby to help in the general fun, had come to share in the pleasure of their little sufferers; and wherever one turned, some sweet and tender picture, touched in by the hand of living nature, seemed to bring one closer to one's fellow-creatures, for sympathy and pity.

Here was one mild, decent-looking family—the father a well-mannered mechanic, the mother a soft-eyed, pretty young woman, with a baby and a sturdy little rogue of five—come to see a very lovely little girl, brought in last night, with some acute affection of the lungs. Quite unconsciously the young mother made many a touching picture, the like of which Raffaelle saw and noted in his day, as she pressed her sick child's fevered face against her own cool cheek, and soothed its moments of weariness with her pretty motherly devices—pretty, if at times not quite wise. This family interested me much on account of the winsomeness of the woman, the exceeding sweetness of the child, and the polished manner of the father, who was a foreigner—Swiss or German, I imagine. When I asked him what ailed his child, I got what seemed to be the stereotyped answer of the place, "the bronchitis;" but I made out the underlying causes of bad air and unwholesome lodging, to which so much of our disease in towns is owing. "If I had the means," he said, "I would live in the country. We would all do more than we do, if we had the means," he added, with a pleasant smile.

Passing from them, I came upon a woman dandling in her arms a dark-eyed diminutive child, the smallest for its age I have ever seen. It was eighteen months old, and was not larger than a small monkey, or good sized doll. But it was sprightly and intelligent, though also very fretful and irritable, and with good food and nursing would probably broaden out into something more normally human than it looked at present. Here was a widow with a careworn look and shabby weeds, too sad to be playful, holding listlessly on her knee a pallid attenuated infant, more than half of whose malady was evidently due to starvation; here a young woman, rather flashily dressed, and of a good humoured coarse pattern of humanity, played with her now healthy baby, which she had brought to see the tree out of gratitude for the "kind treatment it had received from the good gentlemen and dear sisters of the ward."

Some of the brighter and more original of the children are for ever imitating all they see done by their elders, as children generally do, and one, whose chest had often been