offspring of the
humbler classes, and many of them orphans. All are instructed in the
same room, but classed apart; that is, the girls occupy one half of
the apartment, and the boys the other, leaving an avenue between them,
which is occupied by the instructors. The boys are under the
superintendence of a master, and the girls under that of a mistress.
Both, however, teach or attend to the various necessities of either,
as circumstances may require. Infants too young to learn, and those
who are sent, either because they are orphans, or because the extreme
poverty of the mother obliges her to do outwork, are amused with toys
and pictures, all, however, of an instructive nature, and which the
elder children delight to exhibit and explain to them in their own
quaint little ways. I have frequently seen an infant, scarcely able to
walk, brought in for the first time, and left on one of the benches of
the school-room, surrounded by those already initiated. The alarm its
new position occasioned to the little creature, at thus suddenly
finding itself abandoned by the only person with whom it was familiar,
in the midst of a multitude of unknown faces, can easily be imagined.
A flood of tears was the first vent to its feelings, accompanied by a
petulant endeavour to follow its parent or nurse. It was immediately,
however, surrounded by a score of little comforters, who, full of the
remembrance of past days, when their fears and their sadness were in
like manner soothed and dissipated, would use a thousand little arts
of consolation--one presenting a toy or picture, another repeating
what has almost become a formula of kindly re-assurance, till smiles
and sunshine would succeed to tears and clouds upon that little brow,
and confidence and content to fear and mistrust. I have often seen the
day thus pass with neophytes as a dream, only to be broken when the
parent or nurse, returning to take them home, found them in the centre
of a little joyous group, the gayest of the gay!

One, after all, cannot wonder at this change, when he contrasts the
scenery of the interior of an infant school with that of the
generality of poor homes. The child, making, as it were, its first
voyage in life, has here been introduced, not merely to a society
conducted on principles of gentleness and kindness, but to a fairyland
of marvels for the fascination of its intellectual faculties. From the
ceiling to the _dado_--the wainscotted space at the base, fo