thousand for the want of a hospital; to be taken ill in the wretched room where the whole family lived was to die; the nearest hospital was two miles away.  The young physician had but slender means, but he had a stout heart.  He found this house empty, its rent a song.  He took it, put in half a dozen beds, constituted himself the physician and his wife the nurse, and opened the Children’s Hospital.  Very soon the rooms became wards; the wards became crowded with children; the one nurse was multiplied by twenty; the one physician by six.  Very soon, too, the physician lay upon his death-bed, killed by the work.  But the Children’s Hospital was founded, and now it stands, not far off, a stately building with one of its wards—­the Heckford Ward—­named after the physician who gave his own life to save the children.  When the house ceased to be a hospital it was taken by a Mr. Dawson, who was the first to start here a club for the very rough lads.  He, too, gave his life for the cause, for the illness which killed him was due to overwork and neglect.  Devotion and death are therefore associated with this old house.

The fourth large house is now degraded to a common lodging-house.  But it has still its fine old staircase.

The Parish of St. James’s, Ratcliff, consists of an irregular patch of ground having the river on the south, and the Commercial Road, one of the great arteries of London, on the north.  It contains about seven thousand people, of whom some three thousand are Irish Catholics.  It includes a number of small, mean, and squalid streets; there is not anywhere in the great city a collection of streets smaller or meaner.  The people live in tenement-houses, very often one family for every room—­in one street, for instance, of fifty houses, there are one hundred and thirty families.  The men are nearly all dock-labourers—­the descendants of the scuffle-hunters, whose traditions still survive, perhaps, in an unconquerable hatred of government.  The women and girls are shirt-makers, tailoresses, jam-makers, biscuit-makers, match-makers, and rope-makers.

In this parish the only gentlefolk are the clergy and the ladies working in the parish for the Church; there are no substantial shopkeepers, no private residents, no lawyer, no doctor, no professional people of any kind; there are thirty-six public-houses, or one to every hundred adults, so that if each spends on an average only two shillings a week, the weekly takings of each are ten pounds.  Till lately there were forty-six, but ten have been suppressed; there are no places of public entertainment, there are no books, there are hardly any papers except some of those Irish papers whose continued sufferance gives the lie to their own everlasting charges of English tyranny.  Most significant of all, there are no Dissenting chapels, with one remarkable exception.  Fifteen chapels in the three parishes of Ratcliff, Shadwell, and St. George’s have been closed during the last twenty