Page:Life in the Old World - Vol. I.djvu/217

Rh by these boys, which could scarcely have been better performed by a well-trained military band.

In the girl's colony at Bernhem, on the contrary, I lacked altogether the salutary encouragement to good behavior which the rich gifts of the fine arts introduce into it; and moreover, drawing seems to furnish a seed of intellectual culture especially suitable for girls, and calculated to develope them, in more than one respect, for a higher class of social life.

People have said, and still say, a great deal against asylums for the neglected rising generation; and certainly it would be well if they were not required, if the careful training of the child could be safely left to families, or to the private home; but are there not times, in most countries, where, through former neglect, the number of innocent, friendless children, becomes frightfully great? It was so in Belgium, when, immediately after the February revolution in Paris, Duepetiaux obtained the consent of the Belgian Chamber to the establishment of these two asylums, the design of which he had long entertained. The prisons and poor-houses of the country, at that period, contained about twenty thousand poor children. On occasions of this kind, the asylum stands forth like the “holy grove,” on the mountains of Switzerland. It breaks the fall of the increasing avalanche, which, when scattered in many directions, and melted by the sunbeams, becomes transformed into fertilizing brooks and rivers.

The glowing sunset smiled, in the softest rosy light, over the landscape, as we drove home, whilst the mist