—- Ah!  puisqu'à Nantes vous allez,
Un corselet m'en rapport' rez;
Un corselet qui aura des manches,
Qui s'ra brodé de roses blanches."
À Nantes, à Nantes il est allé,
Au corselet n'a plus songé,
II n'a songé qu'à la débauche
Au cabaret, comme les autres.
"Mais que dira m'amie de moi?
Tu mentiras, tu diras,
Qu'i 'n'y a pas de cors'lets à Nantes,
De la sorte qu'elle demande.
—- J'aime mieux la mer sans poissons,
Ou les collines sans vallons,
Ou le printemps sans violettes,
Que de mentir à ma maîtresse."

[_" Farewell, my love! for I must go.   I must go to
serve at Nantes, as my king desires."   " Oh! if you
go to Nantes, bring me a bodice thence; a bodice
decked with sleeves all worked with roses white."
To Nantes, to Nantes, he is gone; no more he
tliinks of the bodice; he only thinks of evil at the
tavern, where are the others.— But what will my love
say of me? Speak false, and say to her that bodices,
such as she asks, are not to be found at Nantes.
I would sooner have the sea without fish, the hills
without dales, the spring without violets, than tell
a lie to my love."]

There is another ballad, entitled La Femme
du Roulier, which turns upon the brutalising
nature of a life of vice, and is a popular song in
Berri.

     BETWEEN THE CRADLE AND THE
                          GRAVE.

TEN years ago* we dwelt on the need in London
of a Hospital for Sick Children, and we described
the effort begun in New Ormond-street
to meet that want in the right spirit. There
were then but half a dozen children, five girls
and a boy, in the new hospital. Now, there are
fifty, and there is an infant nursery attached to
it; also, a country home, as well as a seaside
home for convalescent children. The example
of London, moreover, has been followed with
great energy in Edinburgh during the last three
years, and also in Birmingham and in Liverpool
and other places. The good that the institution
does by its own work, its example doubles;
yet, though it be doubled and re-doubled, still
in the sunless corners of our cities lie the
little children by thousands with bloodless
cheek, and eyes large with sad wonder,
wanting all that is life to a child, even before
they die. That surest of God's blessings
on its helplessness, the cradle or a mother's
bosom, is too precious for many a sick innocent
in the chambers of those who must go forth to
daily work. Is it not horrible to think that, in
the civilised society of this great London, the
chief camp of civilisation in the contest against
all that is yet to be overthrown of barbarism on
earth, the order of life is fallen into a disorder
so complete, that in despite of the strong working
of nature for the joyous health of man in his
first years, for the vigour of his maturity, and
his resistance to chance hurts that might imperil
life before it reaches its appointed season of
decay, there should still be in every fifty thousand
persons dying yearly, twenty-one thousand
of them, children under ten?

* Household "Words. No. 106.

Can use make us forget the ghastly perversion
of all laws of nature represented by these deaths
of little children!   Mr. Catlin, who spent much
of his life among the North American Indians,
says that in a village of two hundred and fifty
persons, after the chief and his wife had consulted
well together over the answer to his question
how many of the children of the tribe had died
during the last ten years, or within their memory,
they could recollect only three; one was
drowned; one was killed by the kick of a horse;
the third, by the bite of a rattlesnake.   A
chief over a tribe of fifteen hundred, made, at
Mr. Catlin's request, like inquiry among the
women of his people, and could hear of no deaths
of children, except by accident, within the memory
of any one of them. When living among
two thousand Mandans, Mr. Catlin was told that
the death of a child under ten years old was
exceeding unusual, and this evidence was
confirmed by the very small number of skulls of
children to be found in the Indian burial-grounds
of North America. These deaths are, in fact,
against the laws of nature; and that, not against
passive laws, but against the striving of every
secret and mysterious power bestowed on the
human body to prevent them. That of the
deaths in our chief centre of civilization there
should be two of children under the age of ten
for every three above that age— and this
understates the truth— would be a shame such as
no people could endure unless it was labouring
with heart and soul for its removal. Yet all
that has been done for the last fifty years has
achieved only this improvement— that the mortality
among our children is reduced by two per cent.

In London alone, there die in a year young
children enough to make an unbroken line of
corpses, lying head to foot, along the kerb-stone
on each side of the way, from Bow Church
down the Bow-road, through Mile-end, and down
the Mile- end-road, Whitechapel-road, White-
chapel, Aldgate, and on through Leadenhall-
street, the Poultry, Cheapside, and on still
through Newgate-street and Skinner-street, to
line with dead children both sides of the whole
length of Holborn and Oxford-street, to beyond
Kensington-gardens.

Disease in children, common as it is, is yet
so far a wonder in nature, that its action is
peculiar, the action of medicine also is peculiar,
and the remedies demand especial adaptation to
the undeveloped frame.  Children's diseases are
so unsuited to treatment in a general hospital
for adults, that in one year before the Hospital for
Sick Children was established, of two thousand
three hundred and sixty-three patients in all the
hospitals, only twenty-six were children under
ten, suffering from, diseases peculiar to their age.