e less than miraculous. Even a ride on a river
ferryboat is often enough to put life into the weary little body again.
The salt breeze no sooner fans the sunken cheeks than the fretful wail is
hushed and the baby slumbers, quietly, restfully, to wake with a laugh and
an appetite, on the way to recovery. The change is so sudden that even the
mother is often deceived and runs in alarm for the doctor, thinking that
the end is at hand.

Scores of such scenes are witnessed daily in the floating hospital of St.
John's Guild, the great marine cradle that goes down the Bay every
week-day, save Saturday, in July and August, with hundreds upon hundreds
of wailing babies and their mothers. Twice a week it is the west-siders'
turn; on three days it gathers its cargo along the East River, where
crowds with yellow tickets stand anxiously awaiting its arrival. The
floating hospital carries its own staff of physicians, including a
member of the Health Department's corps of tenement doctors, who is on the
lookout for chance contagion. The summer corps is appointed by the Health
Board upon the approach of hot weather and begins a systematic canvass of
the tenements immediately after the Fourth of July, followed by the King's
Daughters' nurses, who take up the doctor's work where he had to leave it.
With his prescription pad he carries a bunch of tickets for the Floating
Hospital, and the tickets usually give out first. Any illness that is not
contagious is the baby's best plea for admission. It never pleads in vain,
unless it be well and happy, and even then it is allowed to go along, if
there is no other way for the mother to get off with its sick sister. For
those who need more than one day's outing, the Guild maintains a Seaside
hospital, three hours' sail down the Bay, on Staten Island, where mother
and child may remain without a cent of charge until the rest, the fresh
air, and the romp on the beach have given the baby back health and
strength. Opposite the hospital, but out at sea where the breeze has free
play over the crowded decks, the great hospital barge anchors every day
while the hungry hosts are fed and the children given a salt-water bath on
board.

[Illustration: FLOATING HOSPITAL--ST. JOHN'S GUILD.]

St. John's Guild is not, as some have supposed from its name, a
denominational charity. It is absolutely neutral in matters of sect and
religion, leaving the Church to take care of the soul while it heals the
body of t