from yours. There was no hospital purely for children. There were none who sought the child for the child's sake. The father and the

mother were looked out for with pious care, and the poor, sick, forgotten little one was taken note of by the generous "Society of St. Vincent de Paul" or the "Ladies' Association of Charity," but only as a kind of appendage to the family, and an additional reason for pressing earnestly the claims of poor and suffering parents. The more (in a sense) the better, to the noble and generous visitor, because it strengthened the case before council meetings, and made their appeal irresistible, the highest gratification these good souls seek. But there was no one who went to the child for the child's own self, and who heeded no one, minded no one, cared for no one half so much, as for the little sick one in the dingy corner, forgotten and forlorn. In lanes and alleys and streets and by-ways, there they were, God's best beloved, wards of sorrow, that came in so young for the inheritance of ills to which flesh is heir; nobody's care, nobody's children, but theirs who could do nothing for them; though little might cure the poor wee things, though a gentle word and a sweet smile would go a long way with them; though most of the illness, little as they knew it, came of hunger, or the lack of a keen, intelligent eye to look at them, or one week's light and sunshine out of their dingy home.

Such was the state of things, Associates of St. John, before God called you together. It seemed to me the other day, when reading some verses of that sweet poetess, Adelaide Anne Procter, as if she were describing things as they stood at that time in many a place:

"Once in that great town below us, in a poor and narrow street,
Dwelt a little sickly orphan. Gentle aid or pity sweet

Never in life's rugged pathway guided his poor, tottering feet.

All the striving, anxious forethought, that should only come with age,
Weighed upon his baby-spirit, showed him soon life's sternest page,
Grim want was his nurse, and sorrow was his only heritage.

All too weak for childish pastimes, drearily the hours sped,
On his hands, so small and trembling, leaning his poor aching head,
Or through dark and painful hours lying sleepless on his bed.

Scarce a gleam of azure heaven gleamed above the narrow street,
And the sultry air of summer (that you call so warm and sweet)
Fevered the poor orphan dwelling in the crowded alley's heat."

Such (as this ardent lover of poor children says in another of her poems)

"Such the plaint that late and early, did we listen, we might hear
Close behind us, but the thunder of the city dulls our ear.

Every heart, as God's bright angel, can bid one such sorrow cease-
God has glory when His children bring His poor ones joy and peace."

Well, it is no glory of ours, but a great grace vouchsafed to us, that we did listen, and that the voice of God within us was louder than

the thunder of the city without. You have bidden not one such sorrow, but many a one, to be no more. Not you so much as God's charity in you visited these forlorn little ones, and in each visit He had glory, for they had comfort:

"For a radiant angel hovered smiling o'er the little bed,

White his garments, from his shoulders snowy, dove-like pinions spread,
And a star-like light was shining in a glory round his head."

In these 1674 visits, you have made this house a home of joy to them, and by your loving kindness turned their little couches beneath them in the comfort that you gave, and bending over their little nests taught them the loving care that their Father has for them above all. You have had the beautiful charge brought against you that you made too much of God's little ones. But how you could do that, I know not, though you have altered all the surroundings of their sorrow and changed their sad lot for a brighter one.

Ladies, it is a great good, a great cause for thankfulness, that so many with nothing in themselves to remind them of the miseries of poverty, and who live a life of plenty, of which selfishness and uncharitableness are born, should not be unconscious of the wants of others, or unconcerned for the afflictions of the poor, and that a fellow feeling inspired from on high should make them kind to those with whom it is God's supreme will and love that they should scarce have one want in common. How little do we know, till He reveals it to us, what an awful mass of wretched, dire distress is often close by us, and, so to speak, at our very doors. Only on Friday last, I was called to a poor young girl, in a lane within a stone's throw from St. Francis Xavier's; and, much misery as I have seen, what a revelation that room, that sight, was to me-such a room! such a bed, for a human being to lie upon! such a poor, meek sufferer, struggling with hard breathing, in the thick smoke and unhealthy fog coming and going through the broken windows! Such wretchedness to look up at from one's sick bed! such air to breathe, not in a short visit, but day and night, so uncomplaining! I had nothing to give her; but I knew where I could have it for only half asking; and I ventured to suggest what I could get her. I shall not easily forget her answer and her look. Father, I want for nothing, indeed. Nothing agrees with me. I care for nothing. I have everything I want, there on the table behind you." I looked around the garret, and could see she had, poor creature, just the thing she wanted. "To-morrow, I will go to the hospital, if I am not better." That was a great relief to I left, oppressed by the thought, how near such want may be to us all, but feeling it was impossible, after such a sight, not to love God more, and the poor more, and one's self less.

me.

Well, mind you, the moral of this. We have not done all we ought to. We must be more charitable, more kind, more compassionate, for the future. If we had done all, we were still unprofitable. No vain boasting, for that would spoil everything; it would make God withdraw a little from us, and then what should we do, but faint and

fail in the middle of our work? But I should perhaps have left this moral reflection for the end, as I have not done with telling you all your good.

Associates of St. John the Evangelist, you have not only learned kindness to others, but you have learned the grand lesson of not wasting life. We have but one existence here below. It were a pity to make it vain. "We live but in our lives," as the prophet tells us. It would be a misery to let them pass misspent and useless. The most fleeting things of all are the gifts, the graces, the accomplishments of youth. It were a poor lot to let them fleet by, unavailed of for the highest purposes of our being. Why should this world have the whole of life, which has, in all reason, but too much of it? And yet, little as you know of the world, you know this much, surely, how many there are who live a life of day-dreaming, of somnambulism, of castle-building, of reverie, and of trance; doing nothing, unless feeding dazy thought and filling their souls with fancies that are but the phantom coinage of the brain be doing something. They are following a Will-o'-the-wisp. Visionaries and dreamers! Their days and their nights run away from them, and they have nothing for it all, Their lamps are extinguished for lack of oil; and, like the foolish virgins in the gospel, they can neither buy nor borrow when the bridegroom comes. Idleness and inactivity mark their lives. Sleeping or half awake, or too wide awake to this world, they spend their days in pettinesses, happy as they may be in the castle of indolence, killing time, frittering or fooling-though it is a hard word to usefrittering or fooling away their one precious existence, sleeping like a dormouse when they ought to be up and striving; and then in the end their hopes frustrated-playing a losing game, letting all slip through their fingers-"shooting at a pigeon and killing a crow." They have spent their lives hunting a shadow and catching it at last. If you did not imagine that I had poetry on the brain, I would like to quote a piece for you, so beautiful and true that, whether you imagine it or not, I must quote it :

"All yesterday I was spinning, sitting alone in the sun,

And the dream that I spun was so lengthy, it lasted till day was done.

I heeded not cloud, or shadow, that flitted over the hill,

Or the humming bees, or the swallows, or the trickling of the rill.
I took the threads of my spinning all of the blue summer air,
And a flickering ray of sunlight was woven in here and there.
The shadows grew longer and longer, the evening wind passed by;
And the purple splendour of sunset was flooding the western sky,
But I could not leave my spinning, for so fair my dream had grown,
I heeded not, hour by hour, how the silent day had flown.

At last the gray shadows fell round me, and the night came dark and chill,
And I rose, and ran down the valley, and left it all on the hill.

I went up to the hill this morning to the place where my spinning lay—
There was nothing but glistening dew-drops remained of my work to-day.

Ah! would that but glistening dew-drops remained of the work dreamers do.

But what have you learned? To be busy and active like the early Christians, to work with your own hands that you might have some

thing to give the poor-to join in a great and good cause-to make the most of your time and of your gifts. Here is work that is worth all the poetry in the world, and of your own composition. Bringing forth from your treasury, like the wise man of the gospel, "old things and new." Till I saw you at your Thursday Work-meetings, I never rightly comprehended Hood's "Song of the Shirt"

"Seam, and gusset, and band,-
Band, and gusset, and seam,
Till over the buttons I fall asleep,
And sew them on in my dream."

If I might open that press, there I could show you more poetry than is to be had in the Bodleian Library-epics and odes, songs and sonnets, lays and roundelays, elegies, tragedies, and comedies-in sock and buskin, in long lines of dresses, and jackets, and I don't know what. Ranks of restored stockings, trayfuls of bright-hued baby dresses, piles of gray coloured flannels, groves of curious garments, of every shape and size, with a strange romance about many of them, that have seen other but not better days, and a motley crowd of strange things-forms of poesy that neither I, nor, I believe, the nine muses, know anything anent. Talk about Miss Adelaide Procter or Miss Rosa Mulholland, after that! That is genuine poetry-poetry by day and night, poetry in frost and snow, speaking to the heart of the child that never read, and to the bosom of the child that never spoke. May you still further learn that sweet art and keep alive the sacred fire within you, adding every day to that unrevealed collection, for there are still the naked and the poor amongst us; and the cold and the frost and the snow are not altogether gone from off this earth of

ours.

I now turn to the third and last point to which I would direct your attention; and I have left it for the last, because I feel that I tread on somewhat slippery ground. You brought us since your starting a large sum of money, 113-a marvellous sum-especially when we consider how it was got. Month after month you came with your gifts, getting in return a lecture, mostly, it must be admitted, in the shape of a scolding-a lecture in the strictest and most received sense of the word. To an institution like this, that has nothing but charity to depend upon, £113 9s. 10d. was, and is, no trifling matter, nay, the odd 10 d. was quite a consideration. We were, therefore, grateful; indeed, very grateful. But, I fancy I hear fifty or sixty indignant voices raised, and saying to me-"Why then are we to be disbanded? Why are the Little Children of Mary put in our place? Why did you murmur and complain, as if we did nothing? Why take our boxes from us? Why, in one word, was there ever a question of the Associates of St. John the Evangelist ceasing to be ?"

Why indeed? But was ever such an idea really mooted? Once upon a time, a king "who never said a foolish thing and never did a wise one," proposed to the philosophers of his capital this knotty question: "Why does a fish weigh more out of the water than in it!" The sages put their heads together, and their heads apart, to find the

reason. One said one thing, and another said another, but all said something; and at their answers the king only smiled. At last, one wiser than the rest said to the king: "But, your majesty, with all due reverence, a fish does not weigh more out of water than in it; it weighs the same whether in or out." Now, may it please your majesties, the idea never was entertained of disbanding the beautiful Association of St. John the Evangelist, because you are much more than money value to us. But what did occur was this. We found that one part of the work assigned you was unsuited to you, and you to it. I am afraid I must hurt you, but what can I do? You would not beg for us; you did not know how. You gave your own money to us, you borrowed for us; indeed for all that we know-though perhaps I had better not say it, but confine myself to this-that, like the man in the gospel, unable to dig and ashamed to beg, you had no alternative but to do what you kindly did. You did not assail friend or foe for the sick little children. Besides, you disdained trifles. People were afraid to offer you a little, and perhaps, indeed, they had better not. What we wanted in this department were mites, to whom a mite was much, who were as important as ministers of finance when their box began to rattle-who, when they had a shilling, felt all the responsibilities of the Chancellor of the Exchequer, and who would come here every month to hand over their earnings, as if they were making a transfer of all the Khedive bonds. We wanted children with their hearts in their boxes, who would rattle them five times an hour to know how much they had; who would love to sleep with them under their heads and dream how full they were when there was not as much as a penny in them. You were much that was good, but you were not that. We must, therefore, relieve you of one charge. We are to take your money-boxes from you, and give you, in their stead, these little children of Mary, your little sisters and friends-young, lively, chatty; in a word, boxes of another kind. As John the Evangelist took charge of Mary, and took her as his own, so must you take these. We give you in charge our little pursebearers, our busy cashiers. You are to be good to them at home, to make wealth and fortune smile on them, to direct them to the best investments, to watch the changes for them. Even, if you like, we allow you to give them something, provided it be not all you have. But you must prevent them when they are importunate and overzealous with short-tempered or short-pursed people. Nay more, and more than this we cannot do, we shall gratefully accept whatever you bring us in purse or pocket. To confess the truth, though above our debts, we are not above our wants. We are often tempted to take for our motto the old pagan one: "Rem, quocumque modo rem," which means, "money by hook or by crook." As we cannot afford to be fastidious, we leave ourselves open to receive another £113 from you, if you can honestly make it out. It only remains to speed your Association on its way with every good wish and blessing. God forbid that it should perish in its prime and in its bloom, like too many things of fair promise in this unfair world. It has seen its spring. I trust it may see a bright summer, and a long, long, rich,