OUR BOYS & GIRLS.

New Zealand Mail, Issue 937, 14 February 1890, Page 5

OUR BOYS & GIRLS.

‘ NEVER HAD A HOME !’ ♦ A VFRY COMMONPLACE HISTORY. By Thos. J. Bakhardo, F.R.C.S We need love’s tender lessons tanght As only weakness can ; God hath His small interpreters, The child must teach the man. We wander wide through evil years, Our eyes and faith grow dim ; But he is freshest from His hands, And nearest unto him. Whittier. CHAPTER I. Late in the afternoon of a certain dull day in midwinter, now some years ago, I had retreated to my room at our Stepney Home in the hope of bringing up some of my arrears of correspondence. 1 was congratulating myself on the prospect of an hour or two without interruption, when suddenly there came to the door an urgent summons from one of my chief helpers. * You must come,’ran his message, ‘and see a case in the hall!’ On reaching the spot, my eye immediately tasted upon a group which stirred my heart with deep commiseration. A woman, who might be perhaps forty years of age, stood there with three little girls near her. The eldest of these appeared to be a trifle over thirteen, the youngest about six, the one between the two probably nine years of age. But what a rebuke was the very appearance of the four to the Laodiceans who are always prophesying smooth things, and who seem to believe that everything happens for the best, in this best of possible worlds ! Here are four veritable outcasts ; it did not need a second glance to assure me of that fact. Seldom, even in my peculiar experience, had 1 seen man or woman or child on whose faces and garments were moie unmistakably written ‘ Destitute and outcast.’ Both in person and in raiment the four were fifthy beyond description, their frames were emaciated to the last degree, their faces were sunken, and of a deathly pallor, which threw into prominence the unnatural brilliancy of the eyes, and lent a weird expression to the whole appearance. As to clothing, it would have been difficult to say which of the three girls was the ragedest. Their filthy patchwork of worthless and unoleanly rags waa obviously in the last stages of dilapidation. Not one of the three could boast of a pair of stockings, and the little blue toes of the youngest were peeping from the rents of the very fragmentary old boots that she was wearing, boots of which the uppers appeared to adhere to the soles only by a miracle. In the case of the woman it was manifest that one thin torn garment constituted her sole covering. One of her feet was tied up in rags, having been cut, as I afterwards learned, upon the road. The condition of this poor broken-down mother and her little ones was alike pitiable and repulsive. Alas, it is not a task for squeamish people to succour those who have fallen by the wayside in the fierce struggle; for existence ! It is often the most unpleasant, as it is always the saddest of businesses, to help those who have for a long time lived : in the undercurrents of city misery and destitution. Let me therefore hastily pass on with the ■ mere remark that the dreadful odour of lodging-house fcetor exhaled by the group was so overpowering that, inured though I am, I became after a few minutes actually unable to continue the conversation. It was only with difficulty, and by taking mother and children separately, that I at last succeeded in getting at the main facts which constituted their pa nful story of prolonged privation and wretchedness. The woman had come, I found, to seek the admission of her three little girls into our Homes. There was earnest appeal in every line of her face, and that appeal waa pointed by the famished look and wasted forms of the whole family. Without delay i had a suitable meal supplied to both

mother and girls ; but I found that it was needful to exercise not a little caution in placing food before the two younger children especially, whose eyes glistened raveuously when they saw the fare provided, simple though that waa. After the meal, the first which they had had for many a day, the reaction of their over-strung nerves served to intensify their bodily weakness and bring about an almost utter exhaustion; so that it was only after the lapse of several hours that I was able to cross-question the applicants, and to learn something of the history which lay behind their present miserable circumstances.

*\\ here have you lived ?' was naturally one of my first queries to the mother when she appeared again before myself and my helper. 1 Lived, sir 1’ and she smiled drearily, ‘ nowheer ! tho girls never had a ’otno aU their lives !’ Never had a home ! That was the sum and substance of her history. A few questions sufficed to set her talking, for she was garrulously grateful. She had, I found, married a cripple, whose habits of tramping had become ingrained by life-long custom. He was a handy man, could make and mend a tides in common use (mending kettles and making mousetraps were specially mentioned), and he had something of a voice.

So he and bis wife had walked broad England over, from north to south and from east to west, vending their small wares, singing ballads, earning a little now and again by casual farm- work, and sleeping at night in barns and stables, or, in default of better shelter, under hedges or haystacks. For twelve years Cripple Jack and his wife had tramped it, usually resorting to the towns during the winter mouths, but all the time homeless and dependent nightly either upon such precarious shelter as I have mentioned, or upon casual wards and workhouses. Children were born to them. ‘ I used to go into the work’us then,’ said the woman, * and come out agin with the babby in a fortnight or three weeks. It was, she confessed, ve-y often ‘hard lines’ with them, especially during the winter, even when her husband was alive, and she had been three years a widow. A day’s ‘ ill luck ’ meant no ‘ doss money,’ and a night’s weary tramp.

And so little by little, for I have only given the substance of her replies to many questions, I got at her story of homelessness and hopelessness. The little that the girls could tell me entirely corroborated so far as it went their mother’s statement. But I had passed through an apprenticeship of mistakes caused by deception, and 1 was, I confess, a little incredulous. ‘Don you really mean to tell me now,’ I said at last emphatically, ‘that you and your husband never reallv had a home of aDy kind ?’

* Nevor, sir, so help me,’ she reiterated, with convincing earnestness. ‘Jack and I ha’ bid in refuges, and lodgin’ houses, and wards and dossing kens, and places like that for a night or two at most, but we never paid a week’s rent all the twelve year we wor married. And now that he’s gone, three year come Christmas, me an' the girls have been worser off than before, for we’ve had to go without bread to our mouths and clother to our backs to pay for our doss on the cold nights.’

And so, it seemed, this wretched family had lived all these years, never once possessing even the semblance of a home. The three young girls had been hawked about the country, living from hand to mouth, ever on the verge of destitution, and sleeping anyhow at nights. There had never once come near them in all their troubled lives, so far as I could learn, any direct or positive influence for good. They had had no home comforts, no domestic training, no moral teaching, in short nothing that goes to form in the minds and characters of little female children that gentleness, modesty, and purity, without which they lack more than one can tell. Without plying the mother further, in the way of direct query, I lost no time in com municating with every person to whom she could give me a reference (and these, to do her justice, were not a few) —with tbe chiefs of police in the various towns where Bhe remained any length of time, aud where, owing to her husband’s infirmity, she had been well known : and with farmers throughout the country who had occasionally given work to Cripple Jack and his wife, and who knew them as they returned season by season for odd jobs in the fields. In one case a lady of high rank, connected with some of the greatest personages in the kingdom, had seen the mother when the latter was in the workhouse after the birth of one of her children, and, in response to my application, she wrote to verify the woman’s statements.

(To be continued.)