But that is not all. What mother who has bent
over the most slightly ailing child, does not
know how great and constant is its need of
thoughtful love, to lighten its unwonted burdens?
Always in all of us, but above all in childhood,
the mind acts upon the body. Soothing words,
pleasant sights, patience that smiles away the
fretful mood, variety of toys, happy occupation
that will keep the child's ready attention
fastened upon something outside its own little
round of daily suffering, these are the medicines
for which—who shall say how many?— sick little
children in England pine every day in the
desolate gloom, and every night make their wail
heard in Heaven.

A direct way to much abatement of this
wrong, is, through the doors of the Hospital
for Sick Children in Great Ormond-street.
Steadily as it has advanced, generously and
wisely as it has been supported, it is yet but the
small beginning of a work of duty. In the first
five of its ten years of existence, it received into
its beds more than eleven hundred children
seriously and dangerously ill, and gave the best
help of medicine to thirty thousand who were
nursed at home. In the second half of its life,
nearly two thousand sick children have been
sedulously tended in the little beds of the
hospital, and almost fifty thousand have received
as out-patients gratuitous advice and medicine.
The help is gratuitous; need of help is the
sole recommendation necessary; but the poor
mothers who drop secretly and gratefully their
pence into collection boxes, create a Samaritan
fund amounting to about two pounds every
week, which is spent on sea and country lodging
and care, in behalf of those to whose perfect
restoration change of air is essential.

So much good and wholesome work on behalf
of childhood has been connected with the
London Children's Hospital, since we first made
its acquaintance, that we hardly know where
to begin another report upon it. Let us make a
call next door. The adjoining mansion has been
bought, and its separate front-door is knocked
at, early every morning, by poor mothers with
children in their arms, small parcels cf humanity
here to be left till called for in the evening.
Perhaps by the necessity of going forth to labour
till the evening, there is many a poor mother in
London whose wildest dream would not reach
to the keeping of a nursemaid, and who does not
know how to dispose of her little ones during
the hours of enforced absence. Babies are left
constantly in charge of little children, and the
risks of accidents are the least evils to be
dreaded. Dangerous neglects of food and solace
are inevitable, the little creatures tumble up
into life, or down into their graves, as well
as they can. A few infant nurseries, at which
for a small charge, babies ars taken care of
during the day, had existed in London before
there was one associated with the Children's
Hospital; but there were none so perfect as
that now at work in Great Ormond-street.
There each living parcel as it is left, having
been booked in the hall, is immediately taken
away to be washed and fed. There is a plea-
sant little room for baby-washing, rich in
cupboards and in all sorts of contrivances, that
it takes nothing less than a nursing mother to
appreciate. Visiting the place not long after
Christmas, we found the hall gay with flags and
festoons, and the nurseries themselves, always
bright with pictures and besprinkled with small
toys, transformed with paper flowers, wreaths,
and real greenery, into bower as gay as the
last scene of a pantomime. There are two
of these nurseries formed out of the old parlour
of the mansion.  In the middle of the floor
of one, is the round nest in which the young
ravens are fed; it is a circle of tiny seats
into which babies can be shut, built on the
floor around a central stool, The feeding nurse
sits in the middle of the nest with basin and
spoon; fourteen of the fledglings can be settled
around her; and she then proceeds to revolve on
her stool, filling mouth after mouth— finding
mouth one, as well as mouths two, three, and
four, empty and open, by the time fourteen is
filled. After the food, comes sleep; and in the
other room the walls are lined with neat little
cots. In the middle of the room, is another nest,
but here it is a circle enclosed with net and
floored with cocoa-fibre mattress, upon which a
baby that is in the sprawling stage of existence
may tumble and crawl without hurt. There
are toys adapted to the youngest fingers;
well guarded winter fires; and a smooth and
secure summer terrace out of doors, above the
garden.

There is a good superintendent nurse, and of
her we must add that she takes thought not
only on behalf of the little children, but has
also young small nurses under her instruction.
For, not far off in the same street, Miss Twining
is busy with her benevolent work on behalf of
poor workhouse girls. A part of the care on
their behalf is to have many of them taught how
to mind a baby So they are sent for practical
instruction to the nursery beside the Children's
Hospital, and there they are found sometimes to
begin their studies with so little notion of what
they are about to learn, that one of them was
stopped in the act of hoisting a baby by its
head.

A child left at this infant nursery for a long
day of fourteen hours, is as well cared for as if
it were in a palace— perhaps better than it
would be in many palaces. It has its four meals
and its drinks of milk; its washing, brushing,
amusing, singing, soothing, putting to sleep, and
tucking up; its playthings, and its nursery
yacht. The only charge made to the parent is
for the bare cost of its food—twopence for milk
diet, and fourpence when the diet includes meat.
This new institution is not so well known as it
will soon become, and has never yet received
more than sixteen or eighteen children in one
day. We found about ten in it— all awake, for
it was morning— and all quiet and happy.

Not only here, but among the fifty sick children
in the hospital, we heard not a cry or a
murmur of fretfuluess. We spent some time