Page:Once a Week June to Dec 1863.pdf/367

19, 1863.] they were written, and handed it to Mrs. Monckton.

“That is my address,” he said. “On Tuesday, at seven o’clock in the evening, I shall expect to see you there, and your friend. But if you think to betray me, I am not the man to forget. I have the honour to salute you, Madame. Bon jour.”

He took off his hat with a flourish, and walked away. Eleanor sat for some minutes where he had left her, thinking over what had happened, before she went off to look for Mrs. Lennard.

That night she told the Lennards who she was, and all her story. She felt that it was better to do so. She must have freedom now to act, and to act promptly. She could not do this and yet preserve her secret. Her old ally, Richard Thornton, would be indispensable to her in this crisis, and she wrote to him early in the morning after her interview with Monsieur Bourdon, imploring him to come to her immediately.

lately issued about the case of Children engaged in certain Employments has excited a strong public interest. Perhaps it has led a good many of us to collect our observations and remembrances of children employed in the different ways in which they pass their young lives, in town and country, and under different kinds and degrees of care. I am tempted to relate something of what I have seen and known in connexion with what is disclosed by the Report of the Children’s Employment Commission. I pass over entirely the case of the children of whom no kind or degree of care is taken,—the wild young creatures who, leading in our streets and roads the life of monkeys in the woods, do nothing, learn nothing, and have not a tithe of the pleasures their natures are formed to enjoy.

As soon as the children of the working classes can walk, we may find them in the infant-school. What they look like there depends very much on how the school is managed. It depends, too, on the season of the year, the weather, and other general influences, as well as on the treatment they get at home. In one school the children are so cross that the mistresses do not know what to do with them; and in such a place there is usually a disgusting exhibition of bad skins. All manner of eruptions may be seen there, except the infectious, which of course are not admitted. On a wet day, or a very foggy day, the voice of crying never ceases; and on hot days the little creatures, unable to keep awake, whimper in their sleep.

This is the way that children go on where the air is not pure, and there is not enough of it. In order to see infants wide awake, and bright and playful, there must be plenty of room, plenty of light, and an incessant current of fresh air (not a draught) flowing through the place. This is so well understood now, that modern infant-schools are usually well arranged for ventilation and space. But still one may see, in the airiest room, a large proportion of fretful and unwholesome-looking little ones.

This is when their tender young brains and nerves are overwrought. There are many, in every such school, who ought not to be asked to attend to any sort of lesson for more than one minute at a time; and it may be doubted whether any pupil there—the oldest and the longest-trained—should be kept to the same subject for so much as half an hour. Moreover, there must be a complete indulgence of the natural restlessness of childhood, in order to make the mind capable of instruction to any effectual purpose. A young child who is uncomfortable cannot give its attention to its lesson for even one minute; whereas, if its blood is flowing briskly from exercise, and its spirits are gay from amusement, it enjoys the new idea, and receives it brightly and thoroughly. Even where there is the best management, it is necessary to make allowance for the little creatures on foggy days when they are slow and listless, and on hot days when they drop asleep on their benches.

I seem to linger over this phase of a poor child’s life because the next is so painful—as I have seen it.

At seven, the country boy or girl goes to the village-school. There I have known them spend the best hours of their lives for half-a-dozen years to almost no purpose whatever. I have known boys come out after six or seven, and in one case nine years of schooling,—of six hours a day,—able to do nothing whatever but spell out “a chapter” in an unintelligent way, and scrawl a few lines, with infinite pains, and with abundance of bad spelling. And all the while the boy would have been so useful to his father in the field and garden! and after all, he has that sort of work to learn. It is the same with the girls, except where they are taught to sew in a useful way. Where they spend the three afternoon hours in sewing, they are found to have got before the boys in their learning. From their morning lessons they have learned more than the boys in the morning and afternoon too. From this, some observers at once concluded that girls have quicker wits than boys: but, happily, there were also sensible people looking on who perceived that the lads were sadly uncomfortable in the afternoons;—some yawning; some in perpetual disgrace for falling asleep; some on bad terms with their neighbours, pinching, cuffing, kicking, or being pinched, cuffed, or kicked; some apt to break out into fits of naughtiness,—obstinate fits, and roaring passions. Where the observers of this fact have had the sense and the authority to try the experiment of setting the boys to some other work than book-learning in the afternoons, the result has been that they turn out like the girls,—bright over their books, and brought as forward by three hours’ study as by six.

Before this discovery,—the great discovery which Mr. Chadwick has brought conspicuously before the world,—that the human brain, in its youthful state, is capable of only a limited and ascertainable amount of steady attention, on every day of its life,—the condition of country children on leaving school was most mortifying. The big