These little maidens scrub and cook and wash and sew. They make broth for the poor, and puddings. They are taught to read and write and count, and they learn geography and history as well. Many of them come from dark, unwholesome alleys in the neighborhood,— from a dreary country of dirt and crime and foul talk. In this little convent all is fresh and pure, and the sunshine pours in at every window. I don't know that the life is very exciting there, or that the days spent at the mangle, or round the deal table, can be very stirring ones. But surely they are well spent, learning useful arts, and order and modesty and cleanliness. Think of the cellars and slums from which these children come, and of the quiet little haven where they are fitted for the struggle of life, and are taught to be good and industrious and sober and honest. It is only for a year or two, and then they will go out into the world again, into a world, indeed, of which we know but little, a world of cooks and kitchen-maids and general servants. I daresay these little industrious girls, sitting round that table and spelling out the Gospel of St. John this sunny afternoon, are longing and wistfully thinking about that wondrous coming time. Meanwhile the quiet hour goes by. I say farewell to the kind, smiling mistress; Mary Anne is still busy among her irons; I hear the mangle click as I pass, and the wooden door opens to let me out. In another old house, standing in a deserted old square near the city, there is a school which interested me as much as any of those I have come across, a school for little Jewish boys and girls. We find a tranquil, roomy old house, with light windows looking out into the quiet square with its ancient garden; a carved staircase; a little hall paved with black and white mosaic, whence two doors lead respectively to the Boys' and Girls' schools. Presently a little girl unlocks one of these doors, and runs up before us into the school-room, a long, well-lighted room full of other little girls busy at their desks: little Hebrew maidens with Oriental faces, who look up at us as we come in. This is always rather an alarming moment; but Dr., who knows the children, comes kindly to our help, and begins to tell us about the school. "It is an experiment," he says, “and one which has answered admirably well. Any children are admitted, Christians as well as Jews; and none come without paying something every week, twopence or threepence, as they can afford, for many of them belong to the very poorest of the Jewish community. They receive a very high class of education." (When I presently see what they are doing, and hear the questions they can answer, I begin to feel a very great respect for these little bits of girls in pinafores, and for the people who are experimenting on them.) "But the chief aim of the school is to teach them to help themselves, and to inculcate an honest selfdependence and independence." And, indeed, as I look at them, I cannot but be struck with a certain air of respectability and uprightness among these little creatures, as they sit there, so self-possessed, keen-eyed, well-mannered. "Could you give them a parsing lesson?" the doctor asks the schoolmistress, who shakes her head, and says it is their day for arithmetic, and she may not interrupt the order of their studies; but that they may answer any questions the doctor likes to put to them. Quite little things, with their hair in curls, can tell you about tons and hundredweights, and how many horses it would take to draw a ton, and how many little girls to draw two thirds of a ton, if so many little girls went to a horse; and if a horse were added, or a horse taken away, or two eighths of the little girls, or three fourths of the horse, or one sixth of the ton,- - until the room begins to spin breathlessly round and round, and I am left ever so far behindhand. - "Is avoirdupois an English word?" Up goes a little hand, with fingers working eagerly, and a pretty little creature, with long black hair and a necklace, cries out that it is French, and means, have weight. Then the doctor asks about early English history, and the hands still go up, and they know all about it; and so they do about civilization, and despotism, and charters, and Picts and Scots, and dynasties, and early lawgivers, and colonization, and reformation. "Who was Martin Luther? Why did he leave the Catholic Church? What were indulgences?" "You gave the Pope lots of money, sir, and he gave you dispensations." This was from our little portress. There was another little shrimp of a thing, with wonderful, long-slit, flashing eyes, who could answer anything almost, and whom the other little girls accordingly brought forward in triumph from a back row. "Give me an instance of a free country?" asks the tired questioner. England, sir!" cry the little girls in a shout. "And now of a country which is not free." "America," cry two little voices; and then one adds, "Because there are slaves, sir." "And France," says a third;" and we have seen the emperor in the pictureshops." As I listen to them, I cannot help wishing that many of our little Christians were taught to be as independent and self-respecting in their dealings with the grown-up people who come to look at them. One would fancy that servility was a sacred institution, we cling to it so fondly. We seem to expect an absurd amount of respect from our inferiors; we are ready to pay back just as much to those above us in station and hence I think, notwithstanding all the kindness of heart, all the well-meant and well-spent exertion we see in the world, there is often too great an inequality between those who teach and those who would learn, those who give and those whose harder part it is to receive. We were quite sorry at last when the doctor made a little bow, and said, "Good morning, young ladies," quite politely, to his pupils. It was too late to stop and talk to the little boys down below, but we went for a minute into an inner room out of the large boys' school-room, and there we found half a dozen little men, with their hats on their heads, sitting on their benches, reading the Psalms in Hebrew; and so we stood, for this minute before we came away, listening to David's words spoken in David's tongue, and ringing rather sadly in the boys' touching childish voice. But this is not by any means the principal school which the Jews have established in London. Deep in the heart of the city, beyond St. Paul's, - beyond the Cattle Market, with its countless pens, beyond Finsbury Square, and the narrow Barbican, travelling on through a dirty, close, thickly peopled region, you come to Bell Lane, in Spitalfields. And here you may step in at a door and suddenly find yourself in a wonderful country, in the midst of an unknown people, in a great hall sounding with the voices of hundreds of Jewish children. I know not if it is always so, or if this great assemblage is only temporary, during the preparation for the Passover, but all along the sides of this great room were curtained divisions, and classes sitting divided, busy at their tasks, and children upon children as far as you could see; and somehow as you look you almost see, not these children only, but their forefathers, the Children of Israel, camping in their tents, as they camped at Succoth, when they fled out of the land of Egypt and the house of bondage. Some of these here present to-day are still flying from the house of bondage; many of them are the children of Poles and Russians and Hungarians, who have escaped over here to avoid conscription, and who arrive destitute and in great misery. But to be friendless, and in want, and poverty-stricken is the best recommendation for admission to this noble charity. And here, as elsewhere, any one who comes to the door is taken in, Christian as well as Jew. I have before me now the Report for the year 5619 (1858), during which 1,800 children have come to these schools daily. 10,000 in all have been admitted since the foundation of the school. The working alone of the establishment salaries, repairs, books, laundresses, &c. amounts to more than £2,000 a year. Of this a very considerable portion goes in salaries to its officers, of whom I count more than fifty in the first page of the pamphlet. "£12 to a man for washing boys," is surely well-spent money; "£3 to a beadle, £14 for brooms and brushes, £1 19s. 6d. for repair of clocks," are among the items. The annual subscriptions are under £500, and the very existence of the place (so says the Report) depends on voluntary offerings at the anniversary. That some of these gifts come in with splendid generosity I need scarcely say. Clothing for the whole school arrives at Easter, once a year, and I saw great bales of boots for the boys waiting to be unpacked in their school-room. Tailors and shoemakers come and take measurings beforehand, so that everybody gets his own. To-day, these artists having retired, carpenters and bricklayers are at work all about the place, and the great boys' school, which is larger still than the girls', is necessarily empty, except that a group of teachers and monitors are standing in one corner talking and whispering together. The head-master, with a black beard, comes down from a high desk in an inner room, and tells us about the place, about the cleverness of the children, and the scholarship lately founded; how well many of the boys turn out in after life, and for what good positions they are fitted by the education they are able to receive here; "though Jews," he said, "are debarred by their religious requirements from two thirds of the employments which Christians are able to fill. Masters cannot afford to employ workmen - |