poke-bonnet of the Puseyite
"sister," or the simple garb of unpretending Protestantism? The thing is
being done. The most helpless of all our population--the children of the
working poor--are being kept from the streets, kept from harm, and
trained up to habits of decency, at 4, Bulstrode Street, Marylebone
Lane. Any one can go and see it for himself; and if he does--if he sees,
as I did, the quiet, unostentatious work that is there being done for
the British baby, "all for love and nothing for reward"--I shall be very
much surprised if he does not confess that it is one of the best
antidotes imaginable to baby-farming, and a sight more decorous and
dignified than any Baby Show that could possibly be imagined.

CHAPTER VII.

A NIGHT IN A BAKEHOUSE.

Alarmed at the prospect of "a free breakfast table" in a sense other
than the ordinary one--that is, a breakfast table which should be minus
the necessary accompaniment of bread, or the luxury of French rolls--I
resolved to make myself master, so far as might be possible, of the pros
and cons of the question at issue between bakers and masters at the
period of the anticipated strike some years ago. I confess to having
greatly neglected the subject of strikes. I had attended a few meetings
of the building operatives; but the subject was one in which I myself
was not personally interested. I am not likely to want to build a house,
and might manage my own little repairs while the strike lasted. But I
confess to a leaning for the staff of life. There are sundry small
mouths around me, too, of quite disproportionate capacities in the way
of bread and butter, to say nothing at all of biscuits, buns, and
tartlets. The possibility of having to provide for an impending state of
siege, then, was one that touched me immediately and vitally. Should I,
before the dreaded event, initiate the wife of my bosom in the
mysteries of bread baking? Should I commence forthwith a series of
practical experiments within the limited confines of my kitchen oven? To
prevent the otherwise inevitable heaviness and possible ropiness in my
loaves of the future, some such previous process would certainly have to
be adopted. But, then, in order to calculate the probabilities of the
crisis, an examination of the status in quo was necessary. Having a
habit of going to head-quarters in such questions, I resolved to do so
on the present occasion; so I took my hat, and, as Sam Slick says, "I
off an' o