Page:The poor sisters of Nazareth, Meynell, 1889.djvu/16

10 the cricket in the field at the back and wish they were boys. The nearest houses are characteristic, ivy-grown and Georgian, with gardens. Away back to the south, fragmentary London wanders off into the sunny light, which its roofs are too distant to intercept. The garden of Nazareth House itself lies that way, and close about the house are clusters of trees with pleasant paths and resting-places in the shade. The extent of the buildings is increasing greatly. The great new wing, from the designs of Mr. Leonard Stokes, has been erected at a cost of six thousand pounds—a charge that has to be met wholly from the alms on which the Sisters feed their poor. How to find so enormous a margin when day by day it is only just possible to feed and clothe these hundreds of dependents? But the necessity was imperative. Not only were the Nuns obliged to refuse entrance to forlorn ones whom they could undertake to feed if they had the room wherein to gather them, but the inmates of the house were crowded together in a manner that hindered the liberty of the children and disturbed the silence of the dying. Nazareth House was no longer entirely the house of peace that the Nuns intended to open to the unfortunate; they could not refuse the risk of building, even though debt is the one fear of a Religious Community, and to avoid it they will deny themselves everything except their charities.

To the road the house presents the blankness of wall which is essentially conventual, and which is so rare in our