sted into this warehouse; what goods lay here waiting to
be carried down the Stairs, and so on board ship in the Pool; what
fortunes were made and lost here one knows not. Its ancient history is
gone and lost, but it has a modern history. Here a certain man began,
in a small way, a work which has grown to be great; here he spent and
was spent; here he gave his life for the work, which was for the
children of the poor. He was a young physician; he saw in this squalid
and crowded neighbourhood the lives of the children needlessly
sacrificed by the thousand for the want of a hospital; to be taken ill
in the wretched room where the whole family lived was to die; the
nearest hospital was two miles away. The young physician had but
slender means, but he had a stout heart. He found this house empty,
its rent a song. He took it, put in half a dozen beds, constituted
himself the physician and his wife the nurse, and opened the
Children's Hospital. Very soon the rooms became wards; the wards
became crowded with children; the one nurse was multiplied by twenty;
the one physician by six. Very soon, too, the physician lay upon his
death-bed, killed by the work. But the Children's Hospital was
founded, and now it stands, not far off, a stately building with one
of its wards--the Heckford Ward--named after the physician who gave
his own life to save the children. When the house ceased to be a
hospital it was taken by a Mr. Dawson, who was the first to start here
a club for the very rough lads. He, too, gave his life for the cause,
for the illness which killed him was due to overwork and neglect.
Devotion and death are therefore associated with this old house.

The fourth large house is now degraded to a common lodging-house. But
it has still its fine old staircase.

The Parish of St. James's, Ratcliff, consists of an irregular patch of
ground having the river on the south, and the Commercial Road, one of
the great arteries of London, on the north. It contains about seven
thousand people, of whom some three thousand are Irish Catholics. It
includes a number of small, mean, and squalid streets; there is not
anywhere in the great city a collection of streets smaller or meaner.
The people live in tenement-houses, very often one family for every
room--in one street, for instance, of fifty houses, there are one
hundred and thirty families. The men are nearly all
dock-labourers--the descendants of the scuffle-hunters, whose
traditions stil