seemed from far away, I heard an insistent murmur, like the
breaking of distant surf. I gazed around and speculated. In the bare
brick wall was a narrow, high door. With the instinct of the journalist,
I opened it. The puzzle was explained. It was the Dining Hall of the
Metropolitan Orphanage, and the children were at their seven o'clock
supper. From the cathedral-like calm of the vestibule, I passed into an
atmosphere billowing with the flutter of some five hundred small
tongues. Under the pendant circles of gas-jets were ranged twelve long,
narrow tables packed with children talking and eating with no sense of
any speed-limit. On the one side were boys in cruelly ugly brown suits,
and on the other side, little girls from seven to fifteen in frocks of
some dark material with a thin froth of lace at neck and wrists and
coarse, clean pinafores. Each table was attended by a matron, who served
out the dry bread and hot milk to the prefects, who carried the basins
up and down the tables as deftly as Mr. Paul Cinquevalli. Everywhere was
a prospect of raw faces and figures, which Charity had deliberately made
as uncomely as possible by clownish garb and simple toilet. The children
ate hungrily, and the place was full of the spirit of childhood, an
adulterated spirit. The noise leaped and swelled on all sides in an
exultant joy of itself, but if here and there a jet of jolly laughter
shot from the stream, there were glances from the matrons.

The hall was one of wide spaces, pierced at intervals by the mouths of
bleak, stark corridors. The air of it was limp and heavy with the smell
of food. Polished beams ran below the roof, pretending to uphold it, and
massive columns of painted stone flung themselves aggressively here and
there, and thought they were supporting a small gallery. Outside a full
moon shone, but it filtered through the cheap, half-toned glass of the
windows with a quality of pale lilac. Here and there a window of stained
glass stabbed the brick wall with passionate colour. The moral
atmosphere suggested nut-foods and proteid values.

At half-past seven a sharp bell rang, and with much rumbling and
manoeuvring of forms, the children stood stiffly up, faced round, and,
as a shabby piano tinkled a melody, they sang grace, somewhat in this
fashion:--

To Go doo give sus dailyb read
Dour thankful song we raise-se,
Sand prayth at he who send susf ood,
Dwillf ill lour reart swithp raise, _Zaaa