workhouses open theirs. How little there is in common, however, between even this old-age home, which is of the lowest class, and English workhouses, may be judged from the fact that its inmates betake themselves there gladly and regard admission as a privilege. No fewer than 300 of them pay seventy-two roubles each towards the cost of their own maintenance; while 700 more are paid for by their friends, and the rest by the municipality. Most of those who pay for themselves are lodged in small rooms, two in each room; and the other inmates, in large rooms. In this home, too, the food is decidedly good, and the old people are all well-cared for; they are all provided with comfortable chairs and soft warm beds. The only complaint I heard, indeed, when I was there, came from an old lady of German extraction, who assured me in confidence that the company was very mixed, not at all what she had been accustomed to. Her feelings had been wounded, it seems, by being called upon to share her room with a woman-a most peaceful, gentle old creature-who had no "quarterings."

The St. Petersburg Municipality has solved the creed problem in what is, for that part of the world, a somewhat unusual fashion. In Gorodskaia Bogodielna there are three chapels, an Orthodox, a Lutheran, and a Catholic; and three ministers, a pope, a pastor, and a priest, all living side by side on terms of perfect equality, and in peace! It is not in St. Petersburg, however, but in Moscow, that the best of the Russian old-age homes are to be found, the best, at least, according to our Western notions. Moscow, indeed, is the model city of the whole Empire in all that concerns the poor; and two of the homes there, the Heier and the Boew, are perfect models of what such places should be-the very sort of home one would gladly see established in

every town in England. Both these institutions belong to the city; they were built and endowed by private citizens, and then handed over to the keeping of the municipality, which has undertaken not only to watch over the working of them, but to supplement when necessary their endowment funds by annual grants. They are both in the pleasantest part of the town, the healthiest, too, and they both stand in large gardens.

The Heier Home is a beautiful building, and in a style singularly appropriate to its purpose; everything about it is as simple and plain as possible, yet every room is so prettily arranged that it is a pleasure to see it. On one side of the house there are rooms for thirty-three old men; and on the other, for thirty-three old women; and between them is the common sitting-room, where the whole company pass most of their time, the men reading their papers or playing dominoes, the women sewing or knitting, and both alike talking their hardest more often than not. Although the full cost there is only 180 roubles a year per head (18. a day) the inmates are well fed and well clothed; they are well cared for, too, and life is made as pleasant for them as possible. It is the rule of the house that everyone shall do exactly what he likes, so long as he does nothing to hurt himself or to interfere with the comfort of those around him. "What would you do if one of your old men came home from his walk drunk?" I asked the Director. "What should we do?" he repeated, evidently surprised that there could be any doubt on the point. "Why we should put him to bed, of course, poor old fellow." Such accidents do happen sometimes, he confessed, but very rarely; for it is only the thoroughly respectable who are admitted to the Heier. And certainly a more respectable little community I

never saw, although the majority of them belong to the poorest classonly one woman out of the thirty-three could read. Some of the men, however, were quite surprisingly intelligent and fairly well informed. Several of them volunteered the information that they had been serfs, while one assured me "those were good days." He had had a kind master, he said. One room in the house is reserved exclusively for popes who have been forced to resign their livings through old age or lack of strength. There were five of them there, and very happy they were, at least so one of them told me an old man with a long white beard, and eyes that made one think of Tolstoi.

In the Heier Home I found what I had never found before in an old-age home, a mother and son sitting side by side, both inmates. The mother was eighty, the son sixty-three, but the one did not look a day older or younger than the other. They had spent all their lives working for each other; and when the time came that they could work no longer, they had applied for admission and had both been taken in on the same day. And delighted they were to be there; the old woman's face was simply beaming. All the inmates, indeed, seemed to be keenly alive to the fact that the Fates, in sending them there, had dealt with them most kindly.

The Boew Institution is much larger than the Heier, and on that account less homelike; but in all other respects it is just as comfortable, as well organized and managed. It has 300 inmates, 180 old women and 120 old men, who are maintained at a cost of 120 roubles a year each-9 3-4d. a day. They live in pleasant, prettily furThe Nineteenth Century and After.

nished rooms, six in some rooms, twelve in others, and they have good dinners to eat every day and good clothes to wear. These people, too, belong to the respectable class, and are therefore left to go their own way as much as possible. For the aged poor who are not respectable, who cannot be trusted to go their own way, Moscow reserves a special old-age home, one which is attached to the Beggars' Depot, an institution that corresponds roughly to our casual ward. The inmates of this home neither receive much consideration nor are yet allowed much liberty; still, unless their faces belie them most cruelly, they are treated every whit as well as they deserve.

Of the old-age homes in country districts in Russia, I know nothing, nothing at least beyond the fact that they are few and far between-the veriest white ravens, indeed, in some provinces. It is only the town homes that I have visited, and they certainly are in many respects admirable. They are not perfect of course-in some of them there are glaring defects-none the less they all serve their purpose; for the old and destitute, the weary and worn, find in them a peaceful, comfortable refuge. In the worst among them life smacks of Paradise compared with life in the Day-Room of our London workhouse. Yet there is not a single old-age home in Russia where the cost per head is so high as in that very workhouse. Thus not only Denmark, but Russia, turns to better account the money she spends on her aged poor than England. Even in St. Petersburg and Moscow respectable old men and women not only fare much better than they fare in London, but they cost their fellows much less.

Edith Sellers.

So soon as you shall have put away from you the glamour of the tiny girl, the spells of exquisite sorcery with which she enslaves you, the allurement of her coquetry and caprice, then you may face the question frankly, and acknowledge that the warmest corner of your heart is reserved, alike by reason and instinct, for the little boy. The little boy militant, tramping his nursery with drum and flag and scraps of patriotism; the little boy inconsolable over a broken toy, or shedding tears of tardy repentance upon a melted maternal breast. So easily abashed, so quickly elated; his credulity of glorious chances so illimitable, and his sum of human wealth a penny. He walks among bewildering realities and is companioned by rainbow dreams; the world presents to him a series of golden vistas down which he gazes, faintly cognizant of heroic deed and triumphant adventure at the further end. These are the roads into the past and the future; for the present there is all-desirable and all-sufficient play, upon which the daily details of life are mere excrescences. He is himself so sweet, so tender an anomaly. All those femininities, from petticoats to petulance, which the little girl wears by right, are his only for a brief space. There is continual war within him between these gentler attributes and the incipient virility which crops up at unexpected turns. Thus he draws one's affection by a twofold cord, by his loveliness, his shyness, his frailty, no less than those robuster traits of nascent man by which he puts his sisters to open shame as "only girls." He is the crowned king of childhood; his reign begins at two years old, and is over at eight or nine. By that time he

has shaken off the last vestiges of sexless infancy, and is launched upon a new state of things: boy now, but little boy no longer.

He exists in two main types: the clinging, timorous, quiet child, whose unimpeachable virtue is of the negative kind-more often the result of feeble health than of sound doctrine; and the quicksilver creature, brilliant and restless, scrambling from one mischief into another as fast as his badly bruised legs will carry him. The first may develop into a prig, the last gravitates toward the enfant terrible: each in turn is adorable. Paradoxical though it seem, pathos is the keynote of the little boy and all his works. The little girl is the woman in miniature; her characteristics are not changed but accentuated as years pass. Her toys are the prototypes of her future concerns (this holds good even among savage nations), and all her amusements are of a stereotyped, stay-at-home order. The mother, the housewife, the coquette in embryo, she carries out with more or less verisimilitude the details of these various roles, and is in herself a standing example of the eternal fitness of things. But the little boy must suffer an explicit change before he can slough his babyhood. In him you shall see Man, the overlord, the dominant partner, held in all humiliation for the nonce under the thrall of women tutors and governors, and in bondage to the weak and beggarly elements. He is the victim of a present incapacity for those matters salient to his ultimate career. He is so chained about with "Thou shalt nots" on the one hand, and with petticoat influence and little fears on the other, that the measure of his actual achievement under such harassing

circumstances touches the marvellous. "Every child is to a certain extent a genius," says Schopenhauer, "and every genius is to a certain extent a child"-not least so in a potency of overcoming obstacles. Those daredevil acts with which the man-child asserts his manhood and alarms his anxious friends are counted and punished as crimes; and that somewhat inane nondescript, "a good boy," is usually, as I have said, he who lacks sufficient vitality for escapades. It is the mother, the aunt, the nurse, the governess, the elder sister-all his female tyrants, greatly misunderstanding, who are so "down" upon the little boy for his heinous transgressions of the nursery code. His own sex are laxer or more lenient; they also have been in Arcadia. You may notice this fact in police reports, in newspaper accounts of those accidents to which the foolhardiness of the little boy renders him, alas! so frequently liable. He is there constantly alluded to, with a veiled tenderness, as "the little fellow," "the poor little fellow," "the unfortunate child." There is no such sympathy hinted when anything befalls a little girl, but rather a grumbling air, as who should say, "Que diable fait-elle dans cette galère?" But one reads, "The little boy" (of six) "cried so bitterly when his dog was brought to the hammer that the auctioneer refused to sell it"; and there was a recent story of Boers raiding a farm and all its live stock, when the little boy of the house, flinging his arms round his beloved pony, defied all and sundry to take it at the peril of their lives. The Boers had been little boys themselves; they laughed, and departed in peace. Even the stonyhearted magistrate relents and Justice nods. "A pretty little boy, eight years old, was charged by his father at West London with being of such a disposition as to be entirely beyond pa

rental control. Mr. Plowden, on seeing the little fellow, said he did not intend to relieve a father of the responsibility of controlling a child of eight. The Father: 'I can't control him.' The Magistrate: 'You must control him.' The father went on to state that he had beaten the child and kept him without food. Mr. Plowden said starving a little boy was the way to send him off. The father said the boy had stolen five shillings from his mother, and spent it riding in omnibuses all day long. Mr. Plowden supposed the money was gone, and said the father should keep it out of his way and give him plenty of pudding. The boy was discharged." This is only a sample of many such cases. Eight years old, by the way, seems to be a significant period in the little boy's history. The other day a child of eight actually received the Royal Humane Society's medal for having saved, at various times, three other babes from drowning.

The little girl is certainly mother of the woman, but as to the child being father of the man, that I utterly gainsay. As a rule he is vastly superior to the man, in observation, conscience, sense of beauty, and all those other qualities which fade into the light of common day and leave him but a dull worldling at thirty who was a coruscating brilliance at six. Goethe said that "if children grew up according to early indications, we should have nothing but genuises"; and the inevitable decrescence of this natural ability is one of the losses which men regret most bitterly, though they assign other names to it. Sometimes it is the playfulness of childhood they deplore, sometimes its invincible innocence. "I cannot reach it," Henry Vaughan writes of that vanished spring:

I cannot reach it, and my straining eye Dazzles at it, as at eternity.

Were now that Chronicle alive, Those white designs which children drive,

And the thoughts of each harmless hour,

With their content, too, in my power, Quickly would I make my path even, And by mere playing go to Heaven.

The little boy in the abstract is called Tommy-always Tommy. He may figure under other aliases, but you know he is Tommy at heart. In a score of Du Maurier's drawings you come across the upper-class Tommy, with his bewitching misdeeds and conversational faux pas. Then there is the middle-class child, who sees more of his parents, and who, if he be brought up in the country, inhabits a perpetual wonderland. The poor little slum gamin, whose end is so often tragic, enjoys his abbreviated Tommyhood as much as any. He knows of no better state-and one can always play. One would hesitate to apply to some of these starveling, crippled little beings Herbert Spencer's theory that superfluous energy is the cause of play; and yet with closer knowledge one discovers them playful on the very verge of extinction. Play is the child's primal necessity of life, his means of development, his all in all. Tommy is usually kindly in his play, and has a special weakness for babies, his protective masculine tendency asserting itself. A little boy in charge of a perambulator, such as may frequently be seen in mean streets, is a hundredfold kinder than a little girl in the same position; less apt to neglect his duty, having more sense of responsibility, and manifesting a peculiar gentleness in handling his infant.

Tommy's chief characteristics, I take it, are three: an insatiable curiosity, an inveterate desire to play, and a strong bias towards eating not wisely but too well. Imagination is not common to every child in the same degree,

and one must confess that playfulness, imitativeness, and various other transient attributes are shared by the young of most animals. But it is this amazing inquisitive propensity which makes our hero such a mine of extensive and peculiar information. Let some work be afoot in the roads or streets-pipe-laying, wire-fixing, whatnot-you shall see every little boy straining to dislocation at the arm of his disgusted nurse. It is absolutely necessary that he should acquaint himself with how and why these men are employed, and in what manner the work is done. The little girl in sublime indifference passes with averted eyes. Exactitude as to word, and accuracy as to raison d'être are also strongly marked in Tommy, and are the correlatives of his curiosity. It is this exactitude which hands down the traditional nursery songs, almost ipsissima verba, from generation to generation. One of the queerest instances of the thirst for irrelevant information is to be found in those little boys, just able to write, who perch with pencil and paper on the suburban railway fences, and laboriously register the name of every engine that passes. Aware of these abstruse researches, one is the less surprised at Peter, ætat. two and a half, on being taken by his mother to Kew Gardens, addressing an astounded under-gardener with "You see those Chionodoxas? Well, we've lots of them at home!". or at

Victor, about four, heard discussing with Robin, a year older, the mysteries of triple-expansion boilers; or at Dicky, aged three, using as a war-cry those blessed words Encyclopædia Britannica. Of course, four-fifths of this miscellaneous lore is only attained by the child transforming himself into a walking note of interrogation. "The little boy who was gored to death by a mad bull for asking questions," held