Page:All the Year Round - Series 2 - Volume 1.djvu/76

 ." He was merrily wagging his tail on a boy's pillow when he made this modest appeal to me.

When this Hospital was first opened in January of the present year, the people could not possibly conceive but that somebody paid for the services rendered there; and were disposed to claim them as a right, and to find fault if out of temper. They soon came to understand the case better, and have much increased in gratitude. The mothers of the patients avail themselves very freely of the visiting rules; the fathers, often on Sundays. There is an unreasonable (but still, I think, touching and intelligible), tendency in the parents to take a child away to its wretched home, if on the point of death. One boy who had been thus carried off on a rainy night, when in a violent state of inflammation, and who had been afterwards brought back, had been recovered with exceeding difficulty; but he was a jolly boy, with a specially strong interest in his dinner, when I saw him.

Insufficient food and unwholesome living are the main causes of disease among these small patients. So, nourishment, cleanliness, and ventilation, are the main remedies. Discharged patients are looked after, and invited to come and dine now and then; so are certain famishing creatures who never were patients. Both the lady and the gentleman are well acquainted, not only with the histories of the patients and their families, but with the characters and circumstances of great numbers of their neighbours: of these they keep a register. It is their common experience that people sinking down by inches into deeper and deeper poverty, will conceal it, even from them, if possible, unto the very last extremity.

The nurses of this Hospital are all young; ranging, say, from nineteen to four-and-twenty. They have, even within these narrow limits, what many well-endowed Hospitals would not give them: a comfortable room of their own in which to take their meals. It is a beautiful truth that interest in the children and sympathy with their sorrows, bind these young women to their places far more strongly than any other consideration could. The best skilled of the nurses came originally from a kindred neighbourhood, almost as poor, and she knew how much the work was needed. She is a fair dressmaker. The Hospital cannot pay her as many pounds in the year as there are months in it, and one day the lady regarded it as a duty to speak to her about her improving her prospects and following her trade. No, she said; she could never be so useful, or so happy, elsewhere, any more; she must stay among the children. And she stays. One of the nurses, as I passed her, was washing a baby-boy. Liking her pleasant face, I stopped to speak to her charge: a common, bullet-headed, frowning charge enough, laying hold of his own nose with a slippery grasp, and staring very solemnly out of a blanket. The melting of the pleasant face into delighted smiles as this young gentleman gave an unexpected kick and laughed at me, was almost worth my previous pain.

An affecting play was acted in Paris years ago, called The Children's Doctor. As I parted from my Children's Doctor now in question, I saw in his easy black necktie, in his loose buttoned black frock coat, in his pensive face, in the flow of his dark hair, in his eyelashes, in the very turn of his moustache, the exact realisation of the Paris artist's ideal as it was presented on the stage. But no romancer that I know of, has had the boldness to prefigure the life and home of this young husband and young wife, in the Children's Hospital in the East of London.

I came away from Ratcliffe by the Stepney railway station to the Terminus at Fenchurch-street. Any one who will reverse that route, may retrace my steps.

Madras boy is not a boy. The word is a corruption of the Telugu word "boyi," a palanquin bearer. There is nothing which sounds stranger to a new-comer in Madras than the constant cries of Boy! He makes a call, and immediately on his entering the room the lady of the house cries, Boy! This startles him. But he is reassured by hearing "Yes, mam," answered, and seeing a native (probably of advanced years) appear and receive orders to have the punkah pulled. The master of the house comes in, greets his visitor, says he must stop to tiffin, and immediately roars, Boy! Again the domestic appears, and is ordered to have the horse taken out of the gharie; and so on at short intervals the silvery call or the trumpet roar of, Boy! resounds through the house. Ladies are generally some time before they can bring themselves to be constantly calling Boy! but in a bachelor's house the cry seems to be ever in the air. "Boy, cheroot!" "Boy, fire!" "Boy, soda!" And ever and anon, when the Boy is dozing, or far off, one hears the cry "crescendo," until it is evident that the caller must be red in the face