the hours, the management, and discipline are
not readily adapted to the wants of children.
It was found, when a committee of the
Statistical Society, in 1843, inquired into such
matters, that only one in a hundred of the
inmates of hospital wards was a child suffering
from internal disease. Can we wonder, then,
—when we call to mind the peculiar characteristics
of disease in a child, and the sagacity and
close observation they demand—can we wonder
that the most assiduous students, growing
into medical advisers, can in so many cases, do
no more than sympathise with the distress
of parents, look at a sick child's tongue,
feel its pulse, send powders, and shake their
heads with vain regret over the little corpse,
around which women weep so bitterly?

The want of a Child's Hospital in London
is supplied. The Hospital for Sick Children,
lately established and now open, is situated
in Great Ormond Street, Queen Square.

London, like a fine old oak, that has lived
through some centuries, has its dead bits in
the midst of foliage. When we had provided
ourselves with the address of the Child's
Hospital, and found it to be No. 49, Great
Ormond Street, Queen Square, we were
impressed with a sense of its being very far out
of the way. Great Ormond Street belonged
to our great-grandfathers; it was a bit of
London full of sap a great number of years
ago. It is cut off, now, from the life of the
town—in London, but not of it—a suburb left
between the New Road and High Holborn.
We turned out of the rattle of Holborn into
King Street, and went up Southampton Row
through a short passage which led us into a
square, dozing over its own departed greatness.
Solitude in a crowd is acknowledged
by the poets to be extremely oppressive, and
we felt so much scared in Queen Square at
finding ourselves all alone there, that we had
not enough presence of mind to observe more
than space and houses, and (if our vague
impression be correct) a pump. Moreover, there
were spectral streets, down which the eye was
drawn. Great Ormond Street was written on
a corner house in one of them. It was the
enchanter's label by which we were bidden
forward; so we went into Great Ormond
Street—wondering who lived in its large
houses, some of them mansions—and looking
hazily for No. 49. That was a mansion too:
broad, stuccoed front, quite fresh and white;
bearing the inscription on its surface,
" Hospital for Sick Children." A woman with a
child in her arms was finding ready admission
at the great hall-door. The neat and new
appearance of the hospital walls from the
outside restored our thoughts to our own
day; and we presently resolved, and carried,
that the committee had shown great judgment
in their selection of a situation—quiet (very
quiet), airy, and central.

At the hall-door there was a porter, so new
to his work that the name of a surgeon
to the Institution was a strange sound in his
ears. Crossing a spacious hall, we were
ushered into a fine old ancestral parlour,
which is now the board-room of the Institution;
and there, before a massive antique
chimney-piece, we found a young house-
surgeon.

Many stiff bows and formal introductions
had those old walls seen, when Great Ormond
Street was grand, and when frills and farthingales
lent state to the great mansion. Many
a minuet had been solemnly danced there;
many hearts and fans had fluttered, many
buckram flirtations had had their little hour;
many births, marriages, and deaths, had
passed away, in due and undue course, out of
the great hall-door into the family vaults—
as old-fashioned now, as the family mansion.
Many little faces, radiant in the wintry blaze,
had looked up in the twilight, wondering at
the great old Monument of a chimney-piece,
and at the winking shadows peeping down
from its recesses. Many, far too many, pretty
house-fairies had vanished from before it, and
left blank spaces on the hearth, to be filled
up nevermore.

O! Baby's dead, and will be never, never,
never, seen among us any more! We fell
into a waking dream, and the Spring air
seemed to breathe the words. The young
house-surgeon melted out of the quaint, quiet,
room; in his place, a group of little children
gathered about a weeping lady; and the
lamentation was familiar to the ancient echoes
of the house. Then, there appeared to us a
host of little figures, and cried, " We are
Baby. We were Baby here, each of us in its
generation, and were welcomed with joy and
hope and thankfulness; but no love and no
hope, though they were very strong, could
keep us, and we went our early way! "—
"And we," said another throng of shades,
"were that little child who lived to walk and
talk, and to be the favorite, and to influence
the whole of this great house and make it
very pleasant, until the infection that could
not be stopped, was brought here from those
poorer houses not far off, and struck us one
day while we were at play, and quenched the
light of our bright eyes, and changed our
prattle into moaning, and killed us in our
promise! "—" And I," said another shadow,
"am that girl who, having been a sick child
once, grew to be a woman, and to love and
to be blessed with love, and then—O at that
hardest time!—began to fade, and glided from
the arms of my young husband, never to be
mine on earth! "—" And I," said another
shadow, " am the lame mis-shapen boy who
read so much by this fireside, and suffered so
much pain so patiently, and might have been
as active and as straight as you, if any one had
understood my malady; but I said to my fond
father carrying me in his arms to the bed
from which I never rose: ' I think, O dear
Papa, that it is better I should never be a
man, for who could then carry me like this,
or who could be so careful of me when you