Search -
Studies From Life, by the Author of 'john Halifax, Gentleman'.
Studies From Life by the Author of 'john Halifax Gentleman' Author:Dinah Maria Craik General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1861 Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million book... more »s for free. Excerpt: She stopped to coax out of the gutter a small dirty urchin, struggling along with a still smaller and dirtier urchin in its arms. She certainly has the kindest and motherliest heart in the world, this matron-friend of mine. " Oh," she said, as we traversed the muggy and muddy London street, pausing often, for she was attracted by every form of infantile tribulation -- " oh, what a life they lead, poor people's children! If we could only carry out the plan I was talking of, and set up in every parish of every large town a public nursery." Now the question of public nurseries happened to be the one uppermost in her benevolence atpresent -- and I was going with her to see an establishment of the kind. It interested me as being one of the few charitable " notions " which strike at the root of an evil, instead of lopping off a few of its topmost branches. For certainly, looking at the swarm of children one meets in such a walk as this, and speculating on the homes they spring up in, and the dangers they hourly encounter, it is wonderful how they contrive to struggle up, even to that early phase of infantine life when the children of the London poor appear on the surface of society -- society which, from their very birth, seems set against them. " Poor little wretches! How can they ever grow up to be men and women ? " " Probably not one-fourth of them do," said Mrs , whom I will call, after the good old Baxterian fashion -- Mrs Eeadyhand. " In Manchester, not one-half of the children born survive to their second year. Think of all which that fact implies ! -- of the multitude of tender lives fading out ...« less